Abstract: Deep understanding of myocardial structure of the heart would unravel crucial knowledge for clinical and medical procedures. The MIOCARDIA project is a multidisciplinary project in cooperation with l'Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, Clinica la Creu Blanca and Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The ultimate goal of this project is defining a computational model of the myocardium. The model takes into account the deep interrelation between the anatomy and the mechanics of the heart. The paper explains the workflow of the MIOCARDIA project. It also introduces a multiresolution reconstruction technique based on DT-MRI streamlining for simplified global myocardial model generation. Our reconstructions can restore the most complex myocardial structures and provides evidences of a global helical organization.

Abstract: Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (CLE) is an emerging imaging technique that allows the in-vivo acquisition of cell patterns of potentially malignant lesions. Such patterns could discriminate between inflammatory and neoplastic lesions and, thus, serve as a first in-vivo biopsy to discard cases that do not actually require a cell biopsy.
The goal of this work is to explore whether CLE images obtained during videobronchoscopy contain enough visual information to discriminate between benign and malign peripheral lesions for lung cancer diagnosis. To do so, we have performed a pilot comparative study with 12 patients (6 adenocarcinoma and 6 benign-inflammatory) using 2 different methods for CLE pattern analysis: visual analysis by 3 experts and a novel methodology that uses graph methods to find patterns in pre-trained feature spaces. Our preliminary results indicate that although visual analysis can only achieve a 60.2% of accuracy, the accuracy of the proposed unsupervised image pattern classification raises to 84.6%.
We conclude that CLE images visual information allow in-vivo detection of neoplastic lesions and graph structural analysis applied to deep-learning feature spaces can achieve competitive results.

Abstract: Bronchoscopy biopsy can be used to diagnose lung cancer without risking complications of other interventions like transthoracic needle aspiration. During bronchoscopy, the clinician has to navigate through the bronchial tree to the target lesion. A main drawback is the difficulty to check whether the exploration is following the correct path. The usual guidance using fluoroscopy implies repeated radiation of the clinician, while alternative systems (like electromagnetic navigation) require specific equipment that increases intervention costs. We propose to compute the navigated path using anatomical landmarks extracted from the sole analysis of videobronchoscopy images. Such landmarks allow matching the current exploration to the path previously planned on a CT to indicate clinician whether the planning is being correctly followed or not. We present a feasibility study of our landmark based CT-video matching using bronchoscopic videos simulated on a virtual bronchoscopy interactive interface.

Abstract: Cardiac Magnetic Resonance images offer the opportunity to study the heart in detail. One of the main issues in its modelling is to create an accurate 3-D reconstruction of the left ventricle from 2-D views. A first step to achieve this goal is the correct registration among the different image planes due to patient movements. In this article, we present an accurate method to correct displacement artifacts using the Normalized Mutual Information. Here, the image views are treated as planes in order to diminish the approximation error caused by the association of a certain thickness, and moved simultaneously to avoid any kind of bias in the alignment process. This method has been validated using real and syntectic plane displacements, yielding promising results.