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David Rotger, Misael Rosales, Jaume Garcia, Oriol Pujol, Josefina Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2003). Active Vessel: A New Multimedia Workstation for Intravascular Ultrasound and Angiography Fusion. Computers in Cardiology, 30, 65–68.
Abstract: AcriveVessel is a new multimedia workstation which enables the visualization, acquisition and handling of both image modalities, on- and ofline. It enables DICOM v3.0 decompression and browsing, video acquisition,repmduction and storage for IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) and angiograms with their corresponding ECG,automatic catheter segmentation in angiography images (using fast marching algorithm). BSpline models definition for vessel layers on IVUS images sequence and an extensively validated tool to fuse information. This approach defines the correspondence of every IVUS image with its correspondent point in the angiogram and viceversa. The 3 0 reconstruction of the NUS catheterhessel enables real distance measurements as well as threedimensional visualization showing vessel tortuosity in the space.
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Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2004). A Regularized Curvature Flow Designed for a Selective Shape Restoration. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 13, 1444–1458.
Abstract: Among all filtering techniques, those based exclu- sively on image level sets (geometric flows) have proven to be the less sensitive to the nature of noise and the most contrast preserving. A common feature to existent curvature flows is that they penalize high curvature, regardless of the curve regularity. This constitutes a major drawback since curvature extreme values are standard descriptors of the contour geometry. We argue that an operator designed with shape recovery purposes should include a term penalizing irregularity in the curvature rather than its magnitude. To this purpose, we present a novel geometric flow that includes a function that measures the degree of local irregularity present in the curve. A main advantage is that it achieves non-trivial steady states representing a smooth model of level curves in a noisy image. Performance of our approach is compared to classical filtering techniques in terms of quality in the restored image/shape and asymptotic behavior. We empirically prove that our approach is the technique that achieves the best compromise between image quality and evolution stabilization.
Keywords: Geometric flows, nonlinear filtering, shape recovery.
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Debora Gil, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Oriol Rodriguez, Josepa Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2006). Statistical Strategy for Anisotropic Adventitia Modelling in IVUS. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 25(6), 768–778.
Abstract: Vessel plaque assessment by analysis of intravascular ultrasound sequences is a useful tool for cardiac disease diagnosis and intervention. Manual detection of luminal (inner) and mediaadventitia (external) vessel borders is the main activity of physicians in the process of lumen narrowing (plaque) quantification. Difficult definition of vessel border descriptors, as well as, shades, artifacts, and blurred signal response due to ultrasound physical properties trouble automated adventitia segmentation. In order to efficiently approach such a complex problem, we propose blending advanced anisotropic filtering operators and statistical classification techniques into a vessel border modelling strategy. Our systematic statistical analysis shows that the reported adventitia detection achieves an accuracy in the range of interobserver variability regardless of plaque nature, vessel geometry, and incomplete vessel borders. Index Terms–-Anisotropic processing, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), vessel border segmentation, vessel structure classification.
Keywords: Corners; T-junctions; Wavelets
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Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2006). Inhibition of false landmarks. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 27(9), 1022–1030.
Abstract: Corners and junctions are landmarks characterized by the lack of differentiability in the unit tangent to the image level curve. Detectors based on differential operators are not, by their own definition, the best posed as they require a higher degree of differentiability to yield a reliable response. We argue that a corner detector should be based on the degree of continuity of the tangent vector to the image level sets, work on the image domain and need no assumptions on neither the image local structure nor the particular geometry of the corner/junction. An operator measuring the degree of differentiability of the projection matrix on the image gradient fulfills the above requirements. Because using smoothing kernels leads to corner misplacement, we suggest an alternative fake response remover based on the receptive field inhibition of spurious details. The combination of both orientation discontinuity detection and noise inhibition produce our inhibition orientation energy (IOE) landmark locator.
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Debora Gil, & Petia Radeva. (2005). Extending anisotropic operators to recover smooth shapes. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 99(1), 110–125.
Abstract: Anisotropic differential operators are widely used in image enhancement processes. Recently, their property of smoothly extending functions to the whole image domain has begun to be exploited. Strong ellipticity of differential operators is a requirement that ensures existence of a unique solution. This condition is too restrictive for operators designed to extend image level sets: their own functionality implies that they should restrict to some vector field. The diffusion tensor that defines the diffusion operator links anisotropic processes with Riemmanian manifolds. In this context, degeneracy implies restricting diffusion to the varieties generated by the vector fields of positive eigenvalues, provided that an integrability condition is satisfied. We will use that any smooth vector field fulfills this integrability requirement to design line connection algorithms for contour completion. As application we present a segmenting strategy that assures convergent snakes whatever the geometry of the object to be modelled is.
Keywords: Contour completion; Functional extension; Differential operators; Riemmanian manifolds; Snake segmentation
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