2010 |
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Simone Balocco, O. Basset, G. Courbebaisse, E. Boni, Alejandro F. Frangi, P. Tortoli, et al. (2010). Estimation Of Viscoelastic Properties Of Vessel Walls Using a Computational Model and Doppler Ultrasound. PMB - Physics in Medicine and Biology, 55(12), 3557–3575.
Abstract: Human arteries affected by atherosclerosis are characterized by altered wall viscoelastic properties. The possibility of noninvasively assessing arterial viscoelasticity in vivo would significantly contribute to the early diagnosis and prevention of this disease. This paper presents a noniterative technique to estimate the viscoelastic parameters of a vascular wall Zener model. The approach requires the simultaneous measurement of flow variations and wall displacements, which can be provided by suitable ultrasound Doppler instruments. Viscoelastic parameters are estimated by fitting the theoretical constitutive equations to the experimental measurements using an ARMA parameter approach. The accuracy and sensitivity of the proposed method are tested using reference data generated by numerical simulations of arterial pulsation in which the physiological conditions and the viscoelastic parameters of the model can be suitably varied. The estimated values quantitatively agree with the reference values, showing that the only parameter affected by changing the physiological conditions is viscosity, whose relative error was about 27% even when a poor signal-to-noise ratio is simulated. Finally, the feasibility of the method is illustrated through three measurements made at different flow regimes on a cylindrical vessel phantom, yielding a parameter mean estimation error of 25%.
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Simone Balocco, O. Camara, E. Vivas, T. Sola, L. Guimaraens, H. A. van Andel, et al. (2010). Feasibility of Estimating Regional Mechanical Properties of Cerebral Aneurysms In Vivo. MEDPHYS - Medical Physics, 37(4), 1689–1706.
Abstract: PURPOSE:
In this article, the authors studied the feasibility of estimating regional mechanical properties in cerebral aneurysms, integrating information extracted from imaging and physiological data with generic computational models of the arterial wall behavior.
METHODS:
A data assimilation framework was developed to incorporate patient-specific geometries into a given biomechanical model, whereas wall motion estimates were obtained from applying registration techniques to a pair of simulated MR images and guided the mechanical parameter estimation. A simple incompressible linear and isotropic Hookean model coupled with computational fluid-dynamics was employed as a first approximation for computational purposes. Additionally, an automatic clustering technique was developed to reduce the number of parameters to assimilate at the optimization stage and it considerably accelerated the convergence of the simulations. Several in silico experiments were designed to assess the influence of aneurysm geometrical characteristics and the accuracy of wall motion estimates on the mechanical property estimates. Hence, the proposed methodology was applied to six real cerebral aneurysms and tested against a varying number of regions with different elasticity, different mesh discretization, imaging resolution, and registration configurations.
RESULTS:
Several in silico experiments were conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed workflow, results found suggesting that the estimation of the mechanical properties was mainly influenced by the image spatial resolution and the chosen registration configuration. According to the in silico experiments, the minimal spatial resolution needed to extract wall pulsation measurements with enough accuracy to guide the proposed data assimilation framework was of 0.1 mm.
CONCLUSIONS:
Current routine imaging modalities do not have such a high spatial resolution and therefore the proposed data assimilation framework cannot currently be used on in vivo data to reliably estimate regional properties in cerebral aneurysms. Besides, it was observed that the incorporation of fluid-structure interaction in a biomechanical model with linear and isotropic material properties did not have a substantial influence in the final results.
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2009 |
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Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Debora Gil, Eduard Fernandez-Nofrerias, Petia Radeva, & Enric Marti. (2009). Approaching Artery Rigid Dynamics in IVUS. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 28(11), 1670–1680.
Abstract: Tissue biomechanical properties (like strain and stress) are playing an increasing role in diagnosis and long-term treatment of intravascular coronary diseases. Their assessment strongly relies on estimation of vessel wall deformation. Since intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequences allow visualizing vessel morphology and reflect its dynamics, this technique represents a useful tool for evaluation of tissue mechanical properties. Image misalignment introduced by vessel-catheter motion is a major artifact for a proper tracking of tissue deformation. In this work, we focus on compensating and assessing IVUS rigid in-plane motion due to heart beating. Motion parameters are computed by considering both the vessel geometry and its appearance in the image. Continuum mechanics laws serve to introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; whereas results in in vivo pullbacks show the reliability of the presented methodologies in clinical cases.
Keywords: Fourier analysis; intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) dynamics; longitudinal motion; quality measures; tissue deformation.
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Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, O. Rodriguez-Leor, J. M. Ferre, & Petia Radeva. (2009). Fast Rigid Registration of Vascular Structures in IVUS Sequences. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, 13(6), 106–1011.
Abstract: Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) technology permits visualization of high-resolution images of internal vascular structures. IVUS is a unique image-guiding tool to display longitudinal view of the vessels, and estimate the length and size of vascular structures with the goal of accurate diagnosis. Unfortunately, due to pulsatile contraction and expansion of the heart, the captured images are affected by different motion artifacts that make visual inspection difficult. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that aligns vascular structures and strongly reduces the saw-shaped oscillation, simplifying the inspection of longitudinal cuts; it reduces the motion artifacts caused by the displacement of the catheter in the short-axis plane and the catheter rotation due to vessel tortuosity. The algorithm prototype aligns 3.16 frames/s and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with similar computational cost. The speed of the algorithm is crucial since it allows to inspect the corrected sequence during patient intervention. Moreover, we improved an indirect methodology for IVUS rigid registration algorithm evaluation.
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Fosca De Iorio, C. Malagelada, Fernando Azpiroz, M. Maluenda, C. Violanti, Laura Igual, et al. (2009). Intestinal motor activity, endoluminal motion and transit. NEUMOT - Neurogastroenterology & Motility, 21(12), 1264–e119.
Abstract: A programme for evaluation of intestinal motility has been recently developed based on endoluminal image analysis using computer vision methodology and machine learning techniques. Our aim was to determine the effect of intestinal muscle inhibition on wall motion, dynamics of luminal content and transit in the small bowel. Fourteen healthy subjects ingested the endoscopic capsule (Pillcam, Given Imaging) in fasting conditions. Seven of them received glucagon (4.8 microg kg(-1) bolus followed by a 9.6 microg kg(-1) h(-1) infusion during 1 h) and in the other seven, fasting activity was recorded, as controls. This dose of glucagon has previously shown to inhibit both tonic and phasic intestinal motor activity. Endoluminal image and displacement was analyzed by means of a computer vision programme specifically developed for the evaluation of muscular activity (contractile and non-contractile patterns), intestinal contents, endoluminal motion and transit. Thirty-minute periods before, during and after glucagon infusion were analyzed and compared with equivalent periods in controls. No differences were found in the parameters measured during the baseline (pretest) periods when comparing glucagon and control experiments. During glucagon infusion, there was a significant reduction in contractile activity (0.2 +/- 0.1 vs 4.2 +/- 0.9 luminal closures per min, P < 0.05; 0.4 +/- 0.1 vs 3.4 +/- 1.2% of images with radial wrinkles, P < 0.05) and a significant reduction of endoluminal motion (82 +/- 9 vs 21 +/- 10% of static images, P < 0.05). Endoluminal image analysis, by means of computer vision and machine learning techniques, can reliably detect reduced intestinal muscle activity and motion.
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