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Simone Balocco, Carlo Gatta, Oriol Pujol, J. Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2010). SRBF: Speckle Reducing Bilateral Filtering. UMB - Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 36(8), 1353–1363.
Abstract: Speckle noise negatively affects medical ultrasound image shape interpretation and boundary detection. Speckle removal filters are widely used to selectively remove speckle noise without destroying important image features to enhance object boundaries. In this article, a fully automatic bilateral filter tailored to ultrasound images is proposed. The edge preservation property is obtained by embedding noise statistics in the filter framework. Consequently, the filter is able to tackle the multiplicative behavior modulating the smoothing strength with respect to local statistics. The in silico experiments clearly showed that the speckle reducing bilateral filter (SRBF) has superior performances to most of the state of the art filtering methods. The filter is tested on 50 in vivo US images and its influence on a segmentation task is quantified. The results using SRBF filtered data sets show a superior performance to using oriented anisotropic diffusion filtered images. This improvement is due to the adaptive support of SRBF and the embedded noise statistics, yielding a more homogeneous smoothing. SRBF results in a fully automatic, fast and flexible algorithm potentially suitable in wide ranges of speckle noise sizes, for different medical applications (IVUS, B-mode, 3-D matrix array US).
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Sergio Escalera, Oriol Pujol, & Petia Radeva. (2010). Re-coding ECOCs without retraining. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 31(7), 555–562.
Abstract: A standard way to deal with multi-class categorization problems is by the combination of binary classifiers in a pairwise voting procedure. Recently, this classical approach has been formalized in the Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework. In the ECOC framework, the one-versus-one coding demonstrates to achieve higher performance than the rest of coding designs. The binary problems that we train in the one-versus-one strategy are significantly smaller than in the rest of designs, and usually easier to be learnt, taking into account the smaller overlapping between classes. However, a high percentage of the positions coded by zero of the coding matrix, which implies a high sparseness degree, does not codify meta-class membership information. In this paper, we show that using the training data we can redefine without re-training, in a problem-dependent way, the one-versus-one coding matrix so that the new coded information helps the system to increase its generalization capability. Moreover, the new re-coding strategy is generalized to be applied over any binary code. The results over several UCI Machine Learning repository data sets and two real multi-class problems show that performance improvements can be obtained re-coding the classical one-versus-one and Sparse random designs compared to different state-of-the-art ECOC configurations.
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David Rotger, Misael Rosales, Jaume Garcia, Oriol Pujol, Josefina Mauri, & Petia Radeva. (2003). Active Vessel: A New Multimedia Workstation for Intravascular Ultrasound and Angiography Fusion. Computers in Cardiology, 30, 65–68.
Abstract: AcriveVessel is a new multimedia workstation which enables the visualization, acquisition and handling of both image modalities, on- and ofline. It enables DICOM v3.0 decompression and browsing, video acquisition,repmduction and storage for IntraVascular UltraSound (IVUS) and angiograms with their corresponding ECG,automatic catheter segmentation in angiography images (using fast marching algorithm). BSpline models definition for vessel layers on IVUS images sequence and an extensively validated tool to fuse information. This approach defines the correspondence of every IVUS image with its correspondent point in the angiogram and viceversa. The 3 0 reconstruction of the NUS catheterhessel enables real distance measurements as well as threedimensional visualization showing vessel tortuosity in the space.
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Jose Seabra, Francesco Ciompi, Oriol Pujol, Josepa Mauri, Petia Radeva, & Joao Sanchez. (2011). Rayleigh Mixture Model for Plaque Characterization in Intravascular Ultrasound. TBME - IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 58(5), 1314–1324.
Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.
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Xavier Carrillo, E Fernandez-Nofrerias, Francesco Ciompi, O. Rodriguez-Leor, Petia Radeva, Neus Salvatella, et al. (2011). Changes in Radial Artery Volume Assessed Using Intravascular Ultrasound: A Comparison of Two Vasodilator Regimens in Transradial Coronary Intervention. JOIC - Journal of Invasive Cardiology, 23(10), 401–404.
Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
This study used intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) to evaluate radial artery volume changes after intraarterial administration of nitroglycerin and/or verapamil.
BACKGROUND:
Radial artery spasm, which is associated with radial artery size, is the main limitation of the transradial approach in percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI).
METHODS:
This prospective, randomized study compared the effect of two intra-arterial vasodilator regimens on radial artery volume: 0.2 mg of nitroglycerin plus 2.5 mg of verapamil (Group 1; n = 15) versus 2.5 mg of verapamil alone (Group 2; n = 15). Radial artery lumen volume was assessed using IVUS at two time points: at baseline (5 minutes after sheath insertion) and post-vasodilator (1 minute after drug administration). The luminal volume of the radial artery was computed using ECOC Random Fields (ECOC-RF), a technique used for automatic segmentation of luminal borders in longitudinal cut images from IVUS sequences.
RESULTS:
There was a significant increase in arterial lumen volume in both groups, with an increase from 451 ± 177 mm³ to 508 ± 192 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 1 and from 456 ± 188 mm³ to 509 ± 170 mm³ (p = 0.001) in Group 2. There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of absolute volume increase (58 mm³ versus 53 mm³, respectively; p = 0.65) or in relative volume increase (14% versus 20%, respectively; p = 0.69).
CONCLUSIONS:
Administration of nitroglycerin plus verapamil or verapamil alone to the radial artery resulted in similar increases in arterial lumen volume according to ECOC-RF IVUS measurements.
Keywords: radial; vasodilator treatment; percutaneous coronary intervention; IVUS; volumetric IVUS analysis
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