Abstract: Despite recovering a normal coronary flow after acute myocardial infarction, percutaneous coronary intervention does not guarantee a proper perfusion (irrigation) of the infarcted area. This damage in microcirculation integrity may detrimentally affect the patient survival. Visual assessment of the myocardium opacification in contrast angiography serves to define a subjective score of the microcirculation integrity myocardial blush analysis (MBA). Although MBA correlates with patient prognosis its visual assessment is a very difficult task that requires of a highly expertise training in order to achieve a good intraobserver and interobserver agreement. In this paper, we provide objective descriptors of the myocardium staining pattern by analyzing the spectrum of the image local statistics. The descriptors proposed discriminate among the different phenomena observed in the angiographic sequence and allow defining an objective score of the myocardial perfusion.

Abstract: The operational model of agonism assumes that the maximum effect a particular receptor system can achieve (the Em parameter) is fixed. Em estimates are above but close to the asymptotic maximum effects of endogenous agonists. The concept of Em is contradicted by superagonists and those positive allosteric modulators that significantly increase the maximum effect of endogenous agonists. An extension of the operational model is proposed that assumes that the Em parameter does not necessarily have a single value for a receptor system but has multiple values associated to multiple active receptor conformations. The model provides a mechanistic link between active receptor conformation and agonist efficacy, which can be useful for the analysis of agonist response under different receptor scenarios.

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.

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.