Abstract: Background: COVID-19 infection, especially in cases with pneumonia, is associated with a high rate of pulmonary embolism (PE). In patients with contraindications for CT pulmonary angiography (CTPA) or non-diagnostic CTPA, perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (Q-SPECT/CT) is a diagnostic alternative. The goal of this study is to develop a radiomic diagnostic system to detect PE based only on the analysis of Q-SPECT/CT scans.
Methods: This radiomic diagnostic system is based on a local analysis of Q-SPECT/CT volumes that includes both CT and Q-SPECT values for each volume point. We present a combined approach that uses radiomic features extracted from each scan as input into a fully connected classifcation neural network that optimizes a weighted crossentropy loss trained to discriminate between three diferent types of image patterns (pixel sample level): healthy lungs (control group), PE and pneumonia. Four types of models using diferent confguration of parameters were tested.
Results: The proposed radiomic diagnostic system was trained on 20 patients (4,927 sets of samples of three types of image patterns) and validated in a group of 39 patients (4,410 sets of samples of three types of image patterns). In the training group, COVID-19 infection corresponded to 45% of the cases and 51.28% in the test group. In the test group, the best model for determining diferent types of image patterns with PE presented a sensitivity, specifcity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of 75.1%, 98.2%, 88.9% and 95.4%, respectively. The best model for detecting
pneumonia presented a sensitivity, specifcity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of 94.1%, 93.6%, 85.2% and 97.6%, respectively. The area under the curve (AUC) was 0.92 for PE and 0.91 for pneumonia. When the results obtained at the pixel sample level are aggregated into regions of interest, the sensitivity of the PE increases to 85%, and all metrics improve for pneumonia.
Conclusion: This radiomic diagnostic system was able to identify the diferent lung imaging patterns and is a frst step toward a comprehensive intelligent radiomic system to optimize the diagnosis of PE by Q-SPECT/CT.

Abstract: Medial representations are powerful tools for describing and parameterizing the volumetric shape of anatomical structures. Accurate computation of one pixel wide medial surfaces is mandatory. Those surfaces must represent faithfully the geometry of the volume. Although morphological methods produce excellent results in 2D, their complexity and quality drops across dimensions, due to a more complex description of pixel neighborhoods. This paper introduces a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. Our experiments show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume

Abstract: A coordinate system describing the interior of organs is a powerful tool for a systematic localization of injured tissue. If the same coordinate values are assigned to specific anatomical landmarks, the coordinate system allows integration of data across different medical image modalities. Harmonic mappings have been used to produce parametric coordinate systems over the surface of anatomical shapes, given their flexibility to set values
at specific locations through boundary conditions. However, most of the existing implementations in medical imaging restrict to either anatomical surfaces, or the depth coordinate with boundary conditions is given at sites
of limited geometric diversity. In this paper we present a method for anatomical volumetric parameterization that extends current harmonic parameterizations to the interior anatomy using information provided by the
volume medial surface. We have applied the methodology to define a common reference system for the liver shape and functional anatomy. This reference system sets a solid base for creating anatomical models of the patient’s liver, and allows comparing livers from several patients in a common framework of reference.

Abstract: In order to provide more intuitive and easily interpretable representations of complex shapes/organs, medial manifolds should reach a compromise between simplicity in geometry and capability for restoring the anatomy/shape of the organ/volume. Existing morphological 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 avoids degenerated medial axis segments. Second, we introduce a continuous operator for accurate and efficient computation of medial structures of arbitrary dimension. We evaluate quantitatively the performance of our method with respect to existing approaches, by applying them to syn- thetic shapes of known medial geometry. We also show its higher performance for medical imaging applications in terms of simplicity of medial structures and capability for reconstructing the anatomical volume.