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Ferran Poveda, Enric Marti, Debora Gil, Francesc Carreras, & Manel Ballester. (2012). "Helical Structure of Ventricular Anatomy by Diffusion Tensor Cardiac MR Tractography " . Journal of American College of Cardiology, 5(7), 754–755.
Abstract: It is widely accepted that myocardial fiber architecture plays a critical role in myocardial contractility and relaxation (1). However, there is a lack of consensus about the distribution of the myocardial fibers and their spatial arrangement in the left and right ventricles. An understanding of the cardiac architecture should benefit the ventricular functional assessment, left ventricular reconstructive surgery planning, or resynchronization therapy in heart failure. Researchers have proposed several conceptual models to describe the architecture of the heart, ranging from gross dissection to histological presentation. The cardiac mesh model (2) proposes that the myocytes are arranged longitudinally and radially change their angulation along the myocardial depth. By contrast, the helical ventricular myocardial model states that the ventricular myocardium is a continuous anatomical helical layout of myocardial fibers (1
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Ferran Poveda, Debora Gil, Enric Marti, Albert Andaluz, Manel Ballester, & Francesc Carreras Costa. (2013). "Helical structure of the cardiac ventricular anatomy assessed by Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging multi-resolution tractography " . Revista Española de Cardiología, 66(10), 782–790.
Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and function of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Several conceptual models of myocardial fiber organization have been proposed but the lack of an automatic and objective methodology prevented an agreement. We sought to deepen in this knowledge through advanced computer graphic representations of the myocardial fiber architecture by diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI).
We performed automatic tractography reconstruction of unsegmented DT-MRI canine heart datasets coming from the public database of the Johns Hopkins University. Full scale tractographies have been build with 200 seeds and are composed by streamlines computed on the vectorial field of primary eigenvectors given at the diffusion tensor volumes. Also, we introduced a novel multi-scale visualization technique in order to obtain a simplified tractography. This methodology allowed to keep the main geometric features of the fiber tracts, making easier to decipher the main properties of the architectural organization of the heart.
On the analysis of the output from our tractographic representations we found exact correlation with low-level details of myocardial architecture, but also with the more abstract conceptualization of a continuous helical ventricular myocardial fiber array.
Objective analysis of myocardial architecture by an automated method, including the entire myocardium and using several 3D levels of complexity, reveals a continuous helical myocardial fiber arrangement of both right and left ventricles, supporting the anatomical model of the helical ventricular myocardial band described by Torrent-Guasp.
Keywords: Heart;Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging;Diffusion tractography;Helical heart;Myocardial ventricular band.
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Francesc Carreras, Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Sandra Pujadas, Chi ho Lion, R.Suarez-Arias, et al. (2012). "Left ventricular torsion and longitudinal shortening: two fundamental components of myocardial mechanics assessed by tagged cine-MRI in normal subjects " . International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, 28(2), 273–284.
Abstract: Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (Cardiac MRI) has become a gold standard diagnostic technique for the assessment of cardiac mechanics, allowing the non-invasive calculation of left ventric- ular long axis longitudinal shortening (LVLS) and absolute myocardial torsion (AMT) between basal and apical left ventricular slices, a movement directly related to the helicoidal anatomic disposition of the myocardial fibers. The aim of this study is to determine AMT and LVLS behaviour and normal values from a group of healthy subjects. A group of 21 healthy volunteers (15 males) (age: 23–55 y.o., mean:30.7 ± 7.5) were prospectively included in an obser- vational study by Cardiac MRI. Left ventricular rotation (degrees) was calculated by custom-made software (Harmonic Phase Flow) in consecutive LV short axis planes tagged cine-MRI sequences. AMT was determined from the difference between basal and apical planes LV rotations. LVLS (%) was determined from the LV longitudinal and horizontal axis cine-MRI images. All the 21 cases studied were interpretable, although in three cases the value of the LV apical rotation could not be determined. The mean rotation of the basal and apical planes at end-systole were -3.71° ± 0.84° and 6.73° ± 1.69° (n:18) respectively, resulting in a LV mean AMT of 10.48° ± 1.63° (n:18). End-systolic mean LVLS was 19.07 ± 2.71%. Cardiac MRI allows for the calculation of AMT and LVLS, fundamental functional components of the ventricular twist mechanics conditioned, in turn, by the anatomical helical layout of the myocardial fibers. These values provide complementary information about systolic ventricular function in relation to the traditional parameters used in daily practice.
Keywords: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); Tagging MRI; Cardiac mechanics; Ventricular torsion
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Guillermo Torres, & Debora Gil. (2020)." A multi-shape loss function with adaptive class balancing for the segmentation of lung structures" . International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, 15(1), S154–55.
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Guillermo Torres, Debora Gil, Antoni Rosell, S. Mena, & Carles Sanchez. (2023)." Virtual Radiomics Biopsy for the Histological Diagnosis of Pulmonary Nodules – Intermediate Results of the RadioLung Project" . International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, .
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Guillermo Torres, Sonia Baeza, Carles Sanchez, Ignasi Guasch, Antoni Rosell, & Debora Gil. (2022). "An Intelligent Radiomic Approach for Lung Cancer Screening " . Applied Sciences, 12(3), 1568.
Abstract: The efficiency of lung cancer screening for reducing mortality is hindered by the high rate of false positives. Artificial intelligence applied to radiomics could help to early discard benign cases from the analysis of CT scans. The available amount of data and the fact that benign cases are a minority, constitutes a main challenge for the successful use of state of the art methods (like deep learning), which can be biased, over-fitted and lack of clinical reproducibility. We present an hybrid approach combining the potential of radiomic features to characterize nodules in CT scans and the generalization of the feed forward networks. In order to obtain maximal reproducibility with minimal training data, we propose an embedding of nodules based on the statistical significance of radiomic features for malignancy detection. This representation space of lesions is the input to a feed
forward network, which architecture and hyperparameters are optimized using own-defined metrics of the diagnostic power of the whole system. Results of the best model on an independent set of patients achieve 100% of sensitivity and 83% of specificity (AUC = 0.94) for malignancy detection.
Keywords: Lung cancer; Early diagnosis; Screening; Neural networks; Image embedding; Architecture optimization
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H.Martin Kjer, Jens Fagertuna, Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester, & Rasmus R. Paulsena. (2016). "Free-form image registration of human cochlear uCT data using skeleton similarity as anatomical prior " . Patter Recognition Letters, 76(1), 76–82.
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Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Luis Badiella, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Francesc Carreras, Sandra Pujades, et al. (2010). "A Normalized Framework for the Design of Feature Spaces Assessing the Left Ventricular Function " . IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 29(3), 733–745.
Abstract: A through description of the left ventricle functionality requires combining complementary regional scores. A main limitation is the lack of multiparametric normality models oriented to the assessment of regional wall motion abnormalities (RWMA). This paper covers two main topics involved in RWMA assessment. We propose a general framework allowing the fusion and comparison across subjects of different regional scores. Our framework is used to explore which combination of regional scores (including 2-D motion and strains) is better suited for RWMA detection. Our statistical analysis indicates that for a proper (within interobserver variability) identification of RWMA, models should consider motion and extreme strains.
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Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Sandra Pujades, & Francesc Carreras. (2008). "Valoracion de la Funcion del Ventriculo Izquierdo mediante Modelos Regionales Hiperparametricos " . Revista Española de Cardiologia, 61(3), 79.
Abstract: La mayoría de la enfermedades cardiovasculares afectan a las propiedades contráctiles de la banda ventricular helicoidal. Esto se refleja en una variación del comportamiento normal de la función ventricular. Parámetros locales tales como los strains, o la deformación experimentada por el tejido, son indicadores capaces de detectar anomalías funcionales en territorios específicos. A menudo, dichos parámetros son considerados de forma separada. En este trabajo presentamos un marco computacional (el Dominio Paramétrico Normalizado, DPN) que permite integrarlos en hiperparámetros funcionales y estudiar sus rangos de normalidad. Dichos rangos permiten valorar de forma objetiva la función regional de cualquier nuevo paciente. Para ello, consideramos secuencias de resonancia magnética etiquetada a nivel basal, medio y apical. Los hiperparámetros se obtienen a partir del movimiento intramural del VI estimado mediante el método Harmonic Phase Flow. El DPN se define a partir de en una parametrización del Ventrículo Izquierdo (VI) en sus coordenadas radiales y circunferencial basada en criterios anatómicos. El paso de los hiperparámetros al DPN hace posible la comparación entre distintos pacientes. Los rangos de normalidad se definen mediante análisis estadístico de valores de voluntarios sanos en 45 regiones del DPN a lo largo de 9 fases sistólicas. Se ha usado un conjunto de 19 (14 H; E: 30.7±7.5) voluntarios sanos para crear los patrones de normalidad y se han validado usando 2 controles sanos y 3 pacientes afectados de contractilidad global reducida. Para los controles los resultados regionales se han ajustado dentro de la normalidad, mientras que para los pacientes se han obtenido valores anormales en las zonas descritas, localizando y cuantificando así el diagnóstico empírico.
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Jaume Garcia, Debora Gil, Sandra Pujades, & Francesc Carreras. (2008). "A Variational Framework for Assessment of the Left Ventricle Motion " . International Journal Mathematical Modelling of Natural Phenomena, 3(6), 76–100.
Abstract: Impairment of left ventricular contractility due to cardiovascular diseases is reflected in left ventricle (LV) motion patterns. An abnormal change of torsion or long axis shortening LV values can help with the diagnosis and follow-up of LV dysfunction. Tagged Magnetic Resonance (TMR) is a widely spread medical imaging modality that allows estimation of the myocardial tissue local deformation. In this work, we introduce a novel variational framework for extracting the left ventricle dynamics from TMR sequences. A bi-dimensional representation space of TMR images given by Gabor filter banks is defined. Tracking of the phases of the Gabor response is combined using a variational framework which regularizes the deformation field just at areas where the Gabor amplitude drops, while restoring the underlying motion otherwise. The clinical applicability of the proposed method is illustrated by extracting normality models of the ventricular torsion from 19 healthy subjects.
Keywords: Key words: Left Ventricle Dynamics, Ventricular Torsion, Tagged Magnetic Resonance, Motion Tracking, Variational Framework, Gabor Transform.
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