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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Debora Gil, Petia Radeva, & E.N.Nofrerias. (2004). "Anisotropic processing of image structures for adventitia detection in intravascular ultrasound images " In Proc. Computers in Cardiology (Vol. 31, pp. 229–232). Chicago (USA).
Abstract: The adventitia layer appears as a weak edge in IVUS images with a non-uniform grey level, which difficulties its detection. In order to enhance edges, we apply an anisotropic filter that homogenizes the grey level along the image significant structures (ridges, valleys and edges). A standard edge detector applied to the filtered image yields a set of candidate points prone to be unconnected. The final model is obtained by interpolating the former line segments along the tangent direction to the level curves of the filtered image with an anisotropic contour closing technique based on functional extension principles
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Jaume Garcia, David Rotger, Francesc Carreras, R.Leta, & Petia Radeva. (2003). "Contrast echography segmentation and tracking by trained deformable models " In Proc. Computers in Cardiology (Vol. 30, pp. 173–176). Centre de Visió per Computador – Dept. Informàtica, UAB Edifici O – Campus UAB, 08193 Bellater.
Abstract: The objective of this work is to segment the human left ventricle myocardium (LVM) in contrast echocardiography imaging and thus track it along a cardiac cycle in order to extract quantitative data about heart function. Ultrasound images are hard to work with due to their speckle appearance. To overcome this we report the combination of active contour models (ACM) or snakes and active shape models (ASM). The ability of ACM in giving closed and smooth curves in addition to the power of the ASM in producing shapes similar to the ones learned, evoke to a robust algorithm. Meanwhile the snake is attracted towards image main features, ASM acts as a correction factor. The algorithm was tested independently on 180 frames and satisfying results were obtained: in 95% the maximum difference between automatic and experts segmentation was less than 12 pixels.
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Debora Gil, Agnes Borras, Sergio Vera, & Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester. (2013). "A Validation Benchmark for Assessment of Medial Surface Quality for Medical Applications " In 9th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (Vol. 7963, pp. 334–343). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Confident use of medial surfaces in medical decision support systems requires evaluating their quality for detecting pathological deformations and describing anatomical volumes. Validation in the medical imaging field is a challenging task mainly due to the difficulties for getting consensual ground truth. In this paper we propose a validation benchmark for assessing medial surfaces in the context of medical applications. Our benchmark includes a home-made database of synthetic medial surfaces and volumes and specific scores for evaluating surface accuracy, its stability against volume deformations and its capabilities for accurate reconstruction of anatomical volumes.
Keywords: Medial Surfaces; Shape Representation; Medical Applications; Performance Evaluation
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Ferran Poveda, Debora Gil, & Enric Marti. (2012). "Multi-resolution DT-MRI cardiac tractography " In Statistical Atlases And Computational Models Of The Heart: Imaging and Modelling Challenges (Vol. 7746, pp. 270–277). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Even using objective measures from DT-MRI no consensus about myocardial architecture has been achieved so far. Streamlining provides good reconstructions at low level of detail, but falls short to give global abstract interpretations. In this paper, we present a multi-resolution methodology that is able to produce simplified representations of cardiac architecture. Our approach produces a reduced set of tracts that are representative of the main geometric features of myocardial anatomical structure. Experiments show that fiber geometry is preserved along reductions, which validates the simplified model for interpretation of cardiac architecture.
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Debora Gil, Agnes Borras, Ruth Aris, Mariano Vazquez, Pierre Lafortune, & Guillame Houzeaux. (2012). "What a difference in biomechanics cardiac fiber makes " In Statistical Atlases And Computational Models Of The Heart: Imaging and Modelling Challenges (Vol. 7746, pp. 253–260). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Computational simulations of the heart are a powerful tool for a comprehensive understanding of cardiac function and its intrinsic relationship with its muscular architecture. Cardiac biomechanical models require a vector field representing the orientation of cardiac fibers. A wrong orientation of the fibers can lead to a
non-realistic simulation of the heart functionality. In this paper we explore the impact of the fiber information on the simulated biomechanics of cardiac muscular anatomy. We have used the John Hopkins database to perform a biomechanical simulation using both a synthetic benchmark fiber distribution and the data obtained experimentally from DTI. Results illustrate how differences in fiber orientation affect heart deformation along cardiac cycle.
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Patricia Marquez, Debora Gil, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2012). "A Complete Confidence Framework for Optical Flow " In Rita Cucchiara V. M. Andrea Fusiello (Ed.), 12th European Conference on Computer Vision – Workshops and Demonstrations (Vol. 7584, pp. 124–133). Florence, Italy, October 7-13, 2012: Springer-Verlag.
Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Existing methods show excellent results when applied to 2D objects, but their quality drops across dimensions. This paper contributes to the computation of medial manifolds in two aspects. First, we provide a standard scheme for the computation of medial manifolds that avoid degenerated medial axis segments; second, we introduce an energy based method which performs independently of the dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to synthetic shapes of known medial geometry. Finally, we show results on shape representation of multiple abdominal organs, exploring the use of medial manifolds for the representation of multi-organ relations.
Keywords: Optical flow, confidence measures, sparsification plots, error prediction plots
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Patricia Marquez, Debora Gil, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2012). "Error Analysis for Lucas-Kanade Based Schemes " In 9th International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 7324, pp. 184–191). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Optical flow is a valuable tool for motion analysis in medical imaging sequences. A reliable application requires determining the accuracy of the computed optical flow. This is a main challenge given the absence of ground truth in medical sequences. This paper presents an error analysis of Lucas-Kanade schemes in terms of intrinsic design errors and numerical stability of the algorithm. Our analysis provides a confidence measure that is naturally correlated to the accuracy of the flow field. Our experiments show the higher predictive value of our confidence measure compared to existing measures.
Keywords: Optical flow, Confidence measure, Lucas-Kanade, Cardiac Magnetic Resonance
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Debora Gil, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Mireia Burnat, Steven Jansen, & Jordi Martinez-Vilalta. (2009). "Structure-Preserving Smoothing of Biomedical Images " In 13th International Conference on Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (Vol. 5702, pp. 427–434). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
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.
Keywords: non-linear smoothing; differential geometry; anatomical structures segmentation; cardiac magnetic resonance; computerized tomography.
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Antoni Gurgui, Debora Gil, Enric Marti, & Vicente Grau. (2016). "Left-Ventricle Basal Region Constrained Parametric Mapping to Unitary Domain " In 7th International Workshop on Statistical Atlases & Computational Modelling of the Heart (Vol. 10124, pp. 163–171).
Abstract: Due to its complex geometry, the basal ring is often omitted when putting different heart geometries into correspondence. In this paper, we present the first results on a new mapping of the left ventricle basal rings onto a normalized coordinate system using a fold-over free approach to the solution to the Laplacian. To guarantee correspondences between different basal rings, we imposed some internal constrained positions at anatomical landmarks in the normalized coordinate system. To prevent internal fold-overs, constraints are handled by cutting the volume into regions defined by anatomical features and mapping each piece of the volume separately. Initial results presented in this paper indicate that our method is able to handle internal constrains without introducing fold-overs and thus guarantees one-to-one mappings between different basal ring geometries.
Keywords: Laplacian; Constrained maps; Parameterization; Basal ring
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Patricia Marquez, H. Kause, A. Fuster, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, L. Florack, Debora Gil, et al. (2014). "Factors Affecting Optical Flow Performance in Tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging " In 17th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (Vol. 8896, pp. 231–238). Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: Changes in cardiac deformation patterns are correlated with cardiac pathologies. Deformation can be extracted from tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using Optical Flow (OF) techniques. For applications of OF in a clinical setting it is important to assess to what extent the performance of a particular OF method is stable across dierent clinical acquisition artifacts. This paper presents a statistical validation framework, based on ANOVA, to assess the motion and appearance factors that have the largest in uence on OF accuracy drop.
In order to validate this framework, we created a database of simulated tMRI data including the most common artifacts of MRI and test three dierent OF methods, including HARP.
Keywords: Optical flow; Performance Evaluation; Synthetic Database; ANOVA; Tagging Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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