Abstract: It is difficult to acquire tagged cardiac MR images with a high temporal and spatial resolution using clinical MR scanners. However, if such images are used for quantifying scores based on motion, it is essential a resolution as high as possible. This paper explores the influence of the temporal resolution of a tagged series on the quantification of myocardial dynamic parameters. To such purpose we have designed a SPAMM (Spatial Modulation of Magnetization) sequence allowing acquisition of sequences at simple and double temporal resolution. Sequences are processed to compute myocardial motion by an automatic technique based on the tracking of the harmonic phase of tagged images (the Harmonic Phase Flow, HPF). The results have been compared to manual tracking of myocardial tags. The error in displacement fields for double resolution sequences reduces 17%.

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: Assessing Optical Flow (OF) quality is essential for its further use in reliable decision support systems. The absence of ground truth in such situations leads to the computation of OF Confidence Measures (CM) obtained from either input or output data. A fair comparison across the capabilities of the different CM for bounding OF error is required in order to choose the best OF-CM pair for discarding points where OF computation is not reliable. This paper presents a statistical probabilistic framework for assessing the quality of a given CM. Our quality measure is given in terms of the percentage of pixels whose OF error bound can not be determined by CM values. We also provide statistical tools for the computation of CM values that ensures a given accuracy of the flow field.

Abstract: Evaluation of the performance and limitations of medical imaging algorithms is essential to estimate their impact in social, economic or clinical aspects. However, validation of medical imaging techniques is a challenging task due to the variety of imaging and clinical problems involved, as well as, the difficulties for systematically extracting a reliable solely ground truth. Although specific validation protocols are reported in any medical imaging paper, there are still two major concerns: definition of standardized methodologies transversal to all problems and generalization of conclusions to the whole clinical data set.
We claim that both issues would be fully solved if we had a statistical model relating ground truth and the output of computational imaging techniques. Such a statistical model could conclude to what extent the algorithm behaves like the ground truth from the analysis of a sampling of the validation data set. We present a statistical inference framework reporting the agreement and describing the relationship of two quantities. We show its transversality by applying it to validation of two different tasks: contour segmentation and landmark correspondence.

Abstract: Smoothing of biomedical images should preserve gray-level transitions between adjacent tissues, while restoring contours consistent with anatomical structures. Anisotropic diffusion operators are based on image appearance discontinuities (either local or contextual) and might fail at weak inter-tissue transitions. Meanwhile, the output of block-wise and morphological operations is prone to present a block structure due to the shape and size of the considered pixel neighborhood. In this contribution, we use differential geometry concepts to define a diffusion operator that restricts to image consistent level-sets. In this manner, the final state is a non-uniform intensity image presenting homogeneous inter-tissue transitions along anatomical structures, while smoothing intra-structure texture. Experiments on different types of medical images (magnetic resonance, computerized tomography) illustrate its benefit on a further process (such as segmentation) of images.