Abstract: Tissue biomechanical properties (like strain and stress) are playing an increasing role in diagnosis and long-term treatment of intravascular coronary diseases. Their assessment strongly relies on estimation of vessel wall deformation. Since intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequences allow visualizing vessel morphology and reflect its dynamics, this technique represents a useful tool for evaluation of tissue mechanical properties. Image misalignment introduced by vessel-catheter motion is a major artifact for a proper tracking of tissue deformation. In this work, we focus on compensating and assessing IVUS rigid in-plane motion due to heart beating. Motion parameters are computed by considering both the vessel geometry and its appearance in the image. Continuum mechanics laws serve to introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; whereas results in in vivo pullbacks show the reliability of the presented methodologies in clinical cases.

Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure linking morphology and func- tion of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for medical and surgical clinical procedures and studies. Diffusion tensor MRI provides a discrete measurement of the 3D arrangement of myocardial fibres by the observation of local anisotropic
diffusion of water molecules in biological tissues. In this work, we present a multi- scale visualisation technique based on DT-MRI streamlining capable of uncovering additional properties of the architectural organisation of the heart. Methods and Materials: We selected the John Hopkins University (JHU) Canine Heart Dataset, where the long axis cardiac plane is aligned with the scanner’s Z- axis. Their equipment included a 4-element passed array coil emitting a 1.5 T. For DTI acquisition, a 3D-FSE sequence is apply. We used 200 seeds for full-scale tractography, while we applied a MIP mapping technique for simplified tractographic reconstruction. In this case, we reduced each DTI 3D volume dimensions by order- two magnitude before streamlining.
Our simplified tractographic reconstruction method keeps the main geometric features of fibres, allowing for an easier identification of their global morphological disposition, including the ventricular basal ring. Moreover, we noticed a clearly visible helical disposition of the myocardial fibres, in line with the helical myocardial band ventricular structure described by Torrent-Guasp. Finally, our simplified visualisation with single tracts identifies the main segments of the helical ventricular architecture.
DT-MRI makes possible the identification of a continuous helical architecture of the myocardial fibres, which validates Torrent-Guasp’s helical myocardial band ventricular anatomical model.

Abstract: Symmetry is an important shape feature. In this paper, a simple and fast method to detect perfect and distorted rotational symmetries of 2D objects is described. The boundary of a shape is polygonally approximated and represented as a string. Rotational symmetries are found by cyclic string matching between two identical copies of the shape string. The set of minimum cost edit sequences that transform the shape string to a cyclically shifted version of itself define the rotational symmetry and its order. Finally, a modification of the algorithm is proposed to detect reflectional symmetries. Some experimental results are presented to show the reliability of the proposed algorithm

Abstract: A system to recognize hand drawn architectural drawings in a CAD environment has been deve- loped. In this paper we focus on its high level interpretation module. To interpret a floor plan, the system must identify several building elements, whose description is stored in a library of pat- terns, as well as their spatial relationships. We propose a structural approach based on subgraph isomorphism techniques to obtain a high-level interpretation of the document. The vectorized input document and the patterns to be recognized are represented by attributed graphs. Discrete relaxation techniques (AC4 algorithm) have been applied to develop the matching algorithm. The process has been divided in three steps: node labeling, local consistency and global consistency verification. The hand drawn creation causes disturbed line drawings with several accuracy errors, which must be taken into account. Here we have identified them and the AC4 algorithm has been adapted to manage them.

Abstract: A hatched area is characterized by a set of parallel straight lines placed at regular intervals. In this paper, a Hough-based schema is introduced to recognize hatched areas in technical documents from attributed graph structures representing the document once it has been vectorized. Defining a Hough-based transform from a graph instead of the raster image allows to drastically reduce the processing time and, second, to obtain more reliable results because straight lines have already been detected in the vectorization step. A second advantage of the proposed method is that no assumptions must be made a priori about the slope and frequency of hatching patterns, but they are computed in run time for each hatched area.