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Hanne Kause, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Patricia Marquez, Andrea Fuster, Luc Florack, Hans van Assen, et al. (2015). "Confidence Measures for Assessing the HARP Algorithm in Tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging " In Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart. Revised selected papers of Imaging and Modelling Challenges 6th International Workshop, STACOM 2015, Held in Conjunction with MICCAI 2015 (Vol. 9534, pp. 69–79). Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: Cardiac deformation and changes therein have been linked to pathologies. Both can be extracted in detail from tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tMRI) using harmonic phase (HARP) images. Although point tracking algorithms have shown to have high accuracies on HARP images, these vary with position. Detecting and discarding areas with unreliable results is crucial for use in clinical support systems. This paper assesses the capability of two confidence measures (CMs), based on energy and image structure, for detecting locations with reduced accuracy in motion tracking results. These CMs were tested on a database of simulated tMRI images containing the most common artifacts that may affect tracking accuracy. CM performance is assessed based on its capability for HARP tracking error bounding and compared in terms of significant differences detected using a multi comparison analysis of variance that takes into account the most influential factors on HARP tracking performance. Results showed that the CM based on image structure was better suited to detect unreliable optical flow vectors. In addition, it was shown that CMs can be used to detect optical flow vectors with large errors in order to improve the optical flow obtained with the HARP tracking algorithm.
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Debora Gil, Oriol Rodriguez-Leon, Petia Radeva, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2007). "Assessing Artery Motion Compensation in IVUS " In Computer Analysis Of Images And Patterns (Vol. 4673, pp. 213–220). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Heidelberg: Springerlink.
Abstract: Cardiac dynamics suppression is a main issue for visual improvement and computation of tissue mechanical properties in IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS). Although in recent times several motion compensation techniques have arisen, there is a lack of objective evaluation of motion reduction in in vivo pullbacks. We consider that the assessment protocol deserves special attention for the sake of a clinical applicability as reliable as possible. Our work focuses on defining a quality measure and a validation protocol assessing IVUS motion compensation. On the grounds of continuum mechanics laws we introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; while results in in vivo pullbacks show its reliability in clinical cases.
Keywords: validation standards; quality measures; IVUS motion compensation; conservation laws; Fourier development
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Sergio Vera, Debora Gil, Agnes Borras, F. Javier Sanchez, Frederic Perez, Marius G. Linguraru, et al. (2012). "Computation and Evaluation of Medial Surfaces for Shape Representation of Abdominal Organs " In H. Yoshida et al (Ed.), Workshop on Computational and Clinical Applications in Abdominal Imaging (Vol. 7029, 223–230). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer Link.
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: medial manifolds, abdomen.
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Carles Sanchez, F. Javier Sanchez, Antoni Rosell, & Debora Gil. (2012). "An illumination model of the trachea appearance in videobronchoscopy images " In Image Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 7325, pp. 313–320). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Videobronchoscopy is a medical imaging technique that allows interactive navigation inside the respiratory pathways. This imaging modality provides realistic images and allows non-invasive minimal intervention procedures. Tracheal procedures are routinary interventions that require assessment of the percentage of obstructed pathway for injury (stenosis) detection. Visual assessment in videobronchoscopic sequences requires high expertise of trachea anatomy and is prone to human error.
This paper introduces an automatic method for the estimation of steneosed trachea percentage reduction in videobronchoscopic images. We look for tracheal rings , whose deformation determines the degree of obstruction. For ring extraction , we present a ring detector based on an illumination and appearance model. This model allows us to parametrise the ring detection. Finally, we can infer optimal estimation parameters for any video resolution.
Keywords: Bronchoscopy, tracheal ring, stenosis assesment, trachea appearance model, segmentation
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Sergio Vera, Miguel Angel Gonzalez Ballester, & Debora Gil. (2012). "Optimal Medial Surface Generation for Anatomical Volume Representations " In MichaelW. David and Vannier H. and H. Yoshida (Ed.), Abdominal Imaging. Computational and Clinical Applications (Vol. 7601, pp. 265–273). Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: Medial representations are a widely used technique in abdominal organ shape representation and parametrization. Those methods require good medial manifolds as a starting point. Any medial
surface used to parametrize a volume should be simple enough to allow an easy manipulation and complete enough to allow an accurate reconstruction of the volume. Obtaining good quality medial
surfaces is still a problem with current iterative thinning methods. This forces the usage of generic, pre-calculated medial templates that are adapted to the final shape at the cost of a drop in volume reconstruction.
This paper describes an operator for generation of medial structures that generates clean and complete manifolds well suited for their further use in medial representations of abdominal organ volumes. While being simpler than thinning surfaces, experiments show its high performance in volume reconstruction and preservation of medial surface main branching topology.
Keywords: Medial surface representation; volume reconstruction
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Antonio Esteban Lansaque. (2019)." An Endoscopic Navigation System for Lung Cancer Biopsy" (Debora Gil, & Carles Sanchez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Lung cancer is one of the most diagnosed cancers among men and women. Actually,
lung cancer accounts for 13% of the total cases with a 5-year global survival
rate in patients. Although Early detection increases survival rate from 38% to 67%, accurate diagnosis remains a challenge. Pathological confirmation requires extracting a sample of the lesion tissue for its biopsy. The preferred procedure for tissue biopsy is called bronchoscopy. A bronchoscopy is an endoscopic technique for the internal exploration of airways which facilitates the performance of minimal invasive interventions with low risk for the patient. Recent advances in bronchoscopic devices have increased their use for minimal invasive diagnostic and intervention procedures, like lung cancer biopsy sampling. Despite the improvement in bronchoscopic device quality, there is a lack of intelligent computational systems for supporting in-vivo clinical decision during examinations. Existing technologies fail to accurately reach the lesion due to several aspects at intervention off-line planning and poor intra-operative guidance at exploration time. Existing guiding systems radiate patients and clinical staff,might be expensive and achieve a suboptimlal 70% of yield boost. Diagnostic yield could be improved reducing radiation and costs by developing intra-operative support systems able to guide the bronchoscopist to the lesion during the intervention. The goal of this PhD thesis is to develop an image-based navigation systemfor intra-operative guidance of bronchoscopists to a target lesion across a path previously planned on a CT-scan. We propose a 3D navigation system which uses the anatomy of video bronchoscopy frames to locate the bronchoscope within the airways. Once the bronchoscope is located, our navigation system is able to indicate the bifurcation which needs to be followed to reach the lesion. In order to facilitate an off-line validation
as realistic as possible, we also present a method for augmenting simulated virtual bronchoscopies with the appearance of intra-operative videos. Experiments performed on augmented and intra-operative videos, prove that our algorithm can be speeded up for an on-line implementation in the operating room.
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Debora Gil, Jordi Gonzalez, & Gemma Sanchez (Eds.). (2007)." Computer Vision: Advances in Research and Development" . 2. Bellaterra (Spain): UAB.
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2009). "Exploring Arterial Dynamics and Structures in IntraVascular Ultrasound Sequences " (Debora Gil, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death in developed countries. Most of them are caused by arterial (specially coronary) diseases, mainly caused by plaque accumulation. Such pathology narrows blood flow (stenosis) and affects artery bio- mechanical elastic properties (atherosclerosis). In the last decades, IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) has become a usual imaging technique for the diagnosis and follow up of arterial diseases. IVUS is a catheter-based imaging technique which shows a sequence of cross sections of the artery under study. Inspection of a single image gives information about the percentage of stenosis. Meanwhile, inspection of longitudinal views provides information about artery bio-mechanical properties, which can prevent a fatal outcome of the cardiovascular disease. On one hand, dynamics of arteries (due to heart pumping among others) is a major artifact for exploring tissue bio-mechanical properties. On the other one, manual stenosis measurements require a manual tracing of vessel borders, which is a time-consuming task and might suffer from inter-observer variations. This PhD thesis proposes several image processing tools for exploring vessel dy- namics and structures. We present a physics-based model to extract, analyze and correct vessel in-plane rigid dynamics and to retrieve cardiac phase. Furthermore, we introduce a deterministic-statistical method for automatic vessel borders detection. In particular, we address adventitia layer segmentation. An accurate validation pro- tocol to ensure reliable clinical applicability of the methods is a crucial step in any proposal of an algorithm. In this thesis we take special care in designing a valida- tion protocol for each approach proposed and we contribute to the in vivo dynamics validation with a quantitative and objective score to measure the amount of motion suppressed.
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Carles Sanchez. (2014)." Tracheal Structure Characterization using Geometric and Appearance Models for Efficient Assessment of Stenosis in Videobronchoscopy" (F. Javier Sanchez, Debora Gil, & Jorge Bernal, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Recent advances in endoscopic devices have increased their use for minimal invasive diagnostic and intervention procedures. Among all endoscopic modalities, bronchoscopy is one of the most frequent with around 261 millions of procedures per year. Although the use of bronchoscopy is spread among clinical facilities it presents some drawbacks, being the visual inspection for the assessment of anatomical measurements the most prevalent of them. In
particular, inaccuracies in the estimation of the degree of stenosis (the percentage of obstructed airway) decreases its diagnostic yield and might lead to erroneous treatments. An objective computation of tracheal stenosis in bronchoscopy videos would constitute a breakthrough for this non-invasive technique and a reduction in treatment cost.
This thesis settles the first steps towards on-line reliable extraction of anatomical information from videobronchoscopy for computation of objective measures. In particular, we focus on the computation of the degree of stenosis, which is obtained by comparing the area delimited by a healthy tracheal ring and the stenosed lumen. Reliable extraction of airway structures in interventional videobronchoscopy is a challenging task. This is mainly due to the large variety of acquisition conditions (positions and illumination), devices (different digitalizations) and in videos acquired at the operating room the unpredicted presence of surgical devices (such as probe ends). This thesis contributes to on-line stenosis assessment in several ways. We
propose a parametric strategy for the extraction of lumen and tracheal rings regions based on the characterization of their geometry and appearance that guide a deformable model. The geometric and appearance characterization is based on a physical model describing the way bronchoscopy images are obtained and includes local and global descriptions. In order to ensure a systematic applicability we present a statistical framework to select the optimal
parameters of our method. Experiments perform on the first public annotated database, show that the performance of our method is comparable to the one provided by clinicians and its computation time allows for a on-line implementation in the operating room.
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Patricia Marquez. (2015)." A Confidence Framework for the Assessment of Optical Flow Performance" (Debora Gil, & Aura Hernandez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Optical Flow (OF) is the input of a wide range of decision support systems such as car driver assistance, UAV guiding or medical diagnose. In these real situations, the absence of ground truth forces to assess OF quality using quantities computed from either sequences or the computed optical flow itself. These quantities are generally known as Confidence Measures, CM. Even if we have a proper confidence measure we still need a way to evaluate its ability to discard pixels with an OF prone to have a large error. Current approaches only provide a descriptive evaluation of the CM performance but such approaches are not capable to fairly compare different confidence measures and optical flow algorithms. Thus, it is of prime importance to define a framework and a general road map for the evaluation of optical flow performance.
This thesis provides a framework able to decide which pairs “ optical flow – confidence measure” (OF-CM) are best suited for optical flow error bounding given a confidence level determined by a decision support system. To design this framework we cover the following points:
Descriptive scores. As a first step, we summarize and analyze the sources of inaccuracies in the output of optical flow algorithms. Second, we present several descriptive plots that visually assess CM capabilities for OF error bounding. In addition to the descriptive plots, given a plot representing OF-CM capabilities to bound the error, we provide a numeric score that categorizes the plot according to its decreasing profile, that is, a score assessing CM performance.
Statistical framework. We provide a comparison framework that assesses the best suited OF-CM pair for error bounding that uses a two stage cascade process. First of all we assess the predictive value of the confidence measures by means of a descriptive plot. Then, for a sample of descriptive plots computed over training frames, we obtain a generic curve that will be used for sequences with no ground truth. As a second step, we evaluate the obtained general curve and its capabilities to really reflect the predictive value of a confidence measure using the variability across train frames by means of ANOVA.
The presented framework has shown its potential in the application on clinical decision support systems. In particular, we have analyzed the impact of the different image artifacts such as noise and decay to the output of optical flow in a cardiac diagnose system and we have improved the navigation inside the bronchial tree on bronchoscopy.
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