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.

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.

Abstract: Restoration of coronary flow after primary percutaneous coronary intervention in acute myocardial infarction does not always correlate with adequate myocardial perfusion. Recently, coronary angiography has been used to assess microcirculation integrity (Myocardial BlushAnalysis, MBA). Although MBA correlates with patient prognosis there are few image processing methods addressing objective perfusion quantification. The goal of this work is to develop statistical descriptors of the myocardial dyeing pattern allowing objective assessment of myocardial perfusion. Experiments on healthy right coronary arteries show that our approach allows reliable measurements without any specific image acquisition protocol.

Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound images represent a unique tool to analyze the morphology of arteries and vessels (plaques, restenosis, etc). The poor quality of these images makes unsupervised segmentation based on traditional segmentation algorithms (such as edge or ridge/valley detection) fail to achieve the expected results. In this paper we present a probabilistic flexible template to separate different regions in the image. In particular, we use elliptic templates to model and detect the shape of the vessel inner wall in IVUS images. We present the results of successful segmentation obtained from patients undergoing stent treatment. A physician team has validated these results.

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.