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Carlo Gatta, Juan Diego Gomez, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Toward robust myocardial blush grade estimation in contrast angiography. In 4th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 5524, 249–256). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The assessment of Myocardial Blush Grade after primary angioplasty is a precious diagnostic tool to understand if the patient needs further medication or the use of specifics drugs. Unfortunately, the assessment of MBG is difficult for non highly specialized staff. Experimental data show that there is poor correlation between MBG assessment of low and high specialized staff, thus reducing its applicability. This paper proposes a method able to achieve an objective measure of MBG, or a set of parameters that correlates with the MBG. The method tracks the blush area starting from just one single frame tagged by the physician. As a consequence, the blush area is kept isolated from contaminating phenomena such as diaphragm and arteries movements. We also present a method to extract four parameters that are expected to correlate with the MBG. Preliminary results show that the method is capable of extracting interesting information regarding the behavior of the myocardial perfusion.
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Carlo Gatta, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Bilateral Enhancers. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 3161–3165).
Abstract: Ten years ago the concept of bilateral filtering (BF) became popular in the image processing community. The core of the idea is to blend the effect of a spatial filter, as e.g. the Gaussian filter, with the effect of a filter that acts on image values. The two filters acts on orthogonal domains of a picture: the 2D lattice of the image support and the intensity (or color) domain. The BF approach is an intuitive way to blend these two filters giving rise to algorithms that perform difficult tasks requiring a relatively simple design. In this paper we extend the concept of BF, proposing the bilateral enhancers (BE). We show how to design proper functions to obtain an edge-preserving smoothing and a selective sharpening. Moreover, we show that the proposed algorithm can perform edge-preserving smoothing and selective sharpening simultaneously in a single filtering.
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Oscar Camara, Estanislao Oubel, Gemma Piella, Simone Balocco, Mathieu De Craene, & Alejandro F. Frangi. (2009). Multi-sequence Registration of Cine, Tagged and Delay-Enhancement MRI with Shift Correction and Steerable Pyramid-Based Detagging. In 5th International Conference on Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart (Vol. 5528, 330–338). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: In this work, we present a registration framework for cardiac cine MRI (cMRI), tagged (tMRI) and delay-enhancement MRI (deMRI), where the two main issues to find an accurate alignment between these images have been taking into account: the presence of tags in tMRI and respiration artifacts in all sequences. A steerable pyramid image decomposition has been used for detagging purposes since it is suitable to extract high-order oriented structures by directional adaptive filtering. Shift correction of cMRI is achieved by firstly maximizing the similarity between the Long Axis and Short Axis cMRI. Subsequently, these shift-corrected images are used as target images in a rigid registration procedure with their corresponding tMRI/deMRI in order to correct their shift. The proposed registration framework has been evaluated by 840 registration tests, considerably improving the alignment of the MR images (mean RMS error of 2.04mm vs. 5.44mm).
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David Rotger, Petia Radeva, & N. Bruining. (2010). Automatic Detection of Bioabsorbable Coronary Stents in IVUS Images using a Cascade of Classifiers. TITB - IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 14(2), 535 – 537.
Abstract: Bioabsorbable drug-eluting coronary stents present a very promising improvement to the common metallic ones solving some of the most important problems of stent implantation: the late restenosis. These stents made of poly-L-lactic acid cause a very subtle acoustic shadow (compared to the metallic ones) making difficult the automatic detection and measurements in images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a cascade of GentleBoost classifiers to detect the stent struts using structural features to code the information of the different subregions of the struts. A stochastic gradient descent method is applied to optimize the overall performance of the detector. Validation results of struts detection are very encouraging with an average F-measure of 81%.
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Simone Balocco, O. Basset, G. Courbebaisse, E. Boni, Alejandro F. Frangi, P. Tortoli, et al. (2010). Estimation Of Viscoelastic Properties Of Vessel Walls Using a Computational Model and Doppler Ultrasound. PMB - Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55(12), 3557–3575.
Abstract: Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative technique to estimate the viscoelastic parameters of a vascular wall Zener model. The approach requires the simultaneous measurement of flow variations and wall displacements, which can be provided by suitable ultrasound Doppler instruments. Viscoelastic parameters are estimated by fitting the theoretical constitutive equations to the experimental measurements using an ARMA parameter approach. The accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed method are tested using reference data generated by numerical simulations of arterial pulsation in which the physiological conditions and the viscoelastic parameters of the model can be suitably varied. The estimated values quantitatively agree with the reference values, showing that the only parameter affected by changing the physiological conditions is viscosity, whose relative error was about 27% even when a poor signal-to-noise ratio is simulated. Finally, the feasibility of the method is illustrated through three measurements made at different flow regimes on a cylindrical vessel phantom, yielding a parameter mean estimation error of 25%.
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Simone Balocco, O. Camara, E. Vivas, T. Sola, L. Guimaraens, H. A. van Andel, et al. (2010). Feasibility of Estimating Regional Mechanical Properties of Cerebral Aneurysms In Vivo. MEDPHYS - Medical Physics, 37(4), 1689–1706.
Abstract: PURPOSE:
In this article, the authors studied the feasibility of estimating regional mechanical properties in cerebral aneurysms, integrating information extracted from imaging and physiological data with generic computational models of the arterial wall behavior.
METHODS:
A data assimilation framework was developed to incorporate patient-specific geometries into a given biomechanical model, whereas wall motion estimates were obtained from applying registration techniques to a pair of simulated MR images and guided the mechanical parameter estimation. A simple incompressible linear and isotropic Hookean model coupled with computational fluid-dynamics was employed as a first approximation for computational purposes. Additionally, an automatic clustering technique was developed to reduce the number of parameters to assimilate at the optimization stage and it considerably accelerated the convergence of the simulations. Several in silico experiments were designed to assess the influence of aneurysm geometrical characteristics and the accuracy of wall motion estimates on the mechanical property estimates. Hence, the proposed methodology was applied to six real cerebral aneurysms and tested against a varying number of regions with different elasticity, different mesh discretization, imaging resolution, and registration configurations.
RESULTS:
Several in silico experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed workflow, results found suggesting that the estimation of the mechanical properties was mainly influenced by the image spatial resolution and the chosen registration configuration. According to the in silico experiments, the minimal spatial resolution needed to extract wall pulsation measurements with enough accuracy to guide the proposed data assimilation framework was of 0.1 mm.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current routine imaging modalities do not have such a high spatial resolution and therefore the proposed data assimilation framework cannot currently be used on in vivo data to reliably estimate regional properties in cerebral aneurysms. Besides, it was observed that the incorporation of fluid-structure interaction in a biomechanical model with linear and isotropic material properties did not have a substantial influence in the final results.
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Neus Salvatella, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, H. Tizon, Xavier Carrillo, et al. (2010). Radial Artery Volume Changes After Administration Of Two Different Intra-arterial Drug Regimens. Assessment by Intravascular Ultrasound. JACC - Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 56(13s1), B119.
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Jose Seabra, F. Javier Sanchez, Francesco Ciompi, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Ultrasonographic Plaque Characterization using a Rayleigh Mixture Model. In 7th IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (1–4).
Abstract: From Nano to Macro
A correct modelling of tissue morphology is determinant for the identification of vulnerable plaques. This paper aims at describing the plaque composition by means of a Rayleigh Mixture Model applied to ultrasonic data. The effectiveness of using a mixture of distributions is established through synthetic and real ultrasonic data samples. Furthermore, the proposed mixture model is used in a plaque classification problem in Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) images of coronary plaques. A classifier tested on a set of 67 in-vitro plaques, yields an overall accuracy of 86% and sensitivity of 92%, 94% and 82%, for fibrotic, calcified and lipidic tissues, respectively. These results strongly suggest that different plaques types can be distinguished by means of the coefficients and Rayleigh parameters of the mixture distribution.
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Neus Salvatella, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, Xavier Carrillo, R. Hemetsberger, et al. (2010). Canvis de volum a la arteria radial despres de la administracio de dos tractaments vasodilatadors. Avaluacio mitjançant ecografia intravascular. In 22nd Congres Societat Catalana de Cardiologia, (179).
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Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, R. Hemetsberger, Francesco Ciompi, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Angel Serrano, M. Bernet, et al. (2010). Caracteritzacio automatica de la placa mitjançant analisis del espectre de radiofreqüencia en estudi de ecografia intracoronaria: resultat de la fusio de dades invivo i exvivo. In 22nd Congres Societat Catalana de Cardiologia, (131).
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Carlo Gatta, Simone Balocco, Francesco Ciompi, R. Hemetsberger, Oriol Rodriguez-Leor, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Real-time gating of IVUS sequences based on motion blur analysis: Method and quantitative validation. In 13th international conference on Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention (Vol. II, pp. 59–67). Springer-Verlag Berlin.
Abstract: Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) is an image-guiding technique for cardiovascular diagnostic, providing cross-sectional images of vessels. During the acquisition, the catheter is pulled back (pullback) at a constant speed in order to acquire spatially subsequent images of the artery. However, during this procedure, the heart twist produces a swinging fluctuation of the probe position along the vessel axis. In this paper we propose a real-time gating algorithm based on the analysis of motion blur variations during the IVUS sequence. Quantitative tests performed on an in-vitro ground truth data base shown that our method is superior to state of the art algorithms both in computational speed and accuracy.
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Carlo Gatta, Simone Balocco, Victoria Martin Yuste, Ruben Leta, & Petia Radeva. (2011). Non-rigid Multi-modal Registration of Coronary Arteries Using SIFTflow. In Jordi Vitria, Joao Miguel Sanches, & Mario Hernandez (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 159–166). LNCS. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The fusion of clinically relevant information coming from different image modalities is an important topic in medical imaging. In particular, different cardiac imaging modalities provides complementary information for the physician: Computer Tomography Angiography (CTA) provides reliable pre-operative information on arteries geometry, even in the presence of chronic total occlusions, while X-Ray Angiography (XRA) allows intra-operative high resolution projections of a specific artery. The non-rigid registration of arteries between these two modalities is a difficult task. In this paper we propose the use of SIFTflow, in registering CTA and XRA images. At the best of our knowledge, this paper proposed SIFTflow as a XRay-CTA registration method for the first time in the literature. To highlight the arteries, so to guide the registration process, the well known Vesselness method has been employed. Results confirm that, to the aim of registration, the arteries must be highlighted and background objects removed as much as possible. Moreover, the comparison with the well known Free Form Deformation technique, suggests that SIFTflow has a great potential in the registration of multi-modal medical images.
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Carolina Malagelada, F.De Lorio, Fernando Azpiroz, Santiago Segui, Petia Radeva, Anna Accarino, et al. (2010). Intestinal Dysmotility in Patients with Functional Intestinal Disorders Demonstrated by Computer Vision Analysis of Capsule Endoscopy Images. In 18th United European Gastroenterology Week (Vol. 56, pp. A19–20).
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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Xavier Carrillo, F. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2011). Plaque Type, Plaque Burden and Wall Shear Stress Relation in Coronary Arteries Assessed by X-ray Angiography and Intravascular Ultrasound: a Qualitative Study. In 14th International Symposium on Applied Sciences in Biomedical and Communication Technologies.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a complete framework that automatically provides fluid-dynamic and plaque analysis from IVUS and Angiographic sequences. Such framework is used to analyze, in three coronary arteries, the relation between wall shear stress with type and amount of plaque. Preliminary qualitative results show an inverse relation between the wall shear stress and the plaque burden, which is confirmed by the fact that the plaque growth is higher on the wall having concave curvature. Regarding the plaque type it was observed that regions having low shear stress are predominantly fibro-lipidic while the heavy calcifications are in general located in areas of the vessel having high WSS.
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E. Serradell, Adriana Romero, R. Leta, Carlo Gatta, & Francesc Moreno-Noguer. (2011). Simultaneous Correspondence and Non-Rigid 3D Reconstruction of the Coronary Tree from Single X-Ray Images. In 13th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 850–857).
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