Abstract: IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) imaging is a useful tool in diagnosis of cardiac diseases since sequences completely show the morphology of coronary vessels. Vessel borders detection, especially the external adventitia layer, plays a central role in morphological measures and, thus, their segmentation feeds development of medical imaging techniques. Deterministic approaches fail to yield optimal results due to the large amount of IVUS artifacts and vessel borders descriptors. We propose using classification techniques to learn the set of descriptors and parameters that best detect vessel borders. Statistical hypothesis test on the error between automated detections and manually traced borders by 4 experts show that our detections keep within inter-observer variability.

Abstract: Three-dimensional intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) allows to visualize and obtain volumetric measurements of coronary lesions through an exploration of the cross sections and longitudinal views of arteries. However, the visualization and subsequent morpho-geometric measurements in IVUS longitudinal cuts are subject to distortion caused by periodic image/vessel motion around the IVUS catheter. Usually, to overcome the image motion artifact ECG-gating and image-gated approaches are proposed, leading to slowing the pullback acquisition or disregarding part of IVUS data. In this paper, we argue that the image motion is due to 3-D vessel geometry as well as cardiac dynamics, and propose a dynamic model based on the tracking of an elliptical vessel approximation to recover the rigid transformation and align IVUS images without loosing any IVUS data. We report an extensive validation with synthetic simulated data and in vivo IVUS sequences of 30 patients achieving an average reduction of the image artifact of 97% in synthetic data and 79% in real-data. Our study shows that IVUS alignment improves longitudinal analysis of the IVUS data and is a necessary step towards accurate reconstruction and volumetric measurements of 3-D IVUS.

Abstract: Cardiac vessel displacement is a main artifact in IVUS sequences. It hinders visualization of the main structures in an appropriate orientation and alignment and affects extracting vessel measurements. In this paper, we present a novel approach for image sequence alignment based on spectral analysis, which removes rigid dynamics, preserving at the same time the vessel geometry. First, we suppress the translation by taking, for each frame, the center of mass of the image as origin of coordinates. In polar coordinates with such point as origin, the rotation appears as a horizontal displacement. The translation induces a phase shift in the Fourier coefficients of two consecutive polar images. We estimate the phase by adjusting a regression plane to the phases of the principal frequencies. Experiments show that the presented strategy suppress cardiac motion regardless of the acquisition device. 1.

Abstract: En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de la aplicación de la metodología del aprendizaje cooperativo a la docencia de dos asignaturas de programación en ingeniería informática. ‘Algoritmos y programación’ y ‘Lenguajes de programación’ son dos asignaturas complementarias que se organizan entorno a un proyecto común que engloba los contenidos de ambas asignaturas. En la docencia de una parte muy importante de estas asignaturas, la metodología del aprendizaje cooperativo se ha adaptado a sus características específicas. Como muestra de esta adaptación presentamos dos ejemplos de las actividades desarrolladas dentro de la docencia de estas asignaturas. Después de tres años de aplicación, el análisis a nivel cualitativo y cuantitativo de los resultados muestra que éstos son muy satisfactorios y que la aplicación del método cooperativo ha mejorado de forma considerable el rendimiento de los alumnos en ambas asignaturas.