13,361 research outputs found
Computational medical imaging for total knee arthroplasty using visualitzation toolkit
This project is presented as a Master Thesis in the field of Civil Engineering, Biomedical specialization. As the
project of an Erasmus exchange student, this thesis has been under supervision both the Universite Livre de
Bruxelles and the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. The purpose of this thesis to put in practice all the
knowledges acquired during this Master in Industrial Engineering in UPC and to be a support for medical staff
in total knee arthoplasty procedures.
Prof. Emmanuel Thienpont has been working for years as orthopaedic surgeon at the Hospital Sant Luc,
Brussels. His years of work and research have been mainly focused on Total Knee Arthroplasty or TKA. During
one of the most important steps of this procedure, the orthopaedic surgeon has to cut the head of the femur
following two perpendicular cutting planes. Nevertheless, the orientation of these planes are directly dependant
of the femur constitution.
This Master Thesis has been conceived in order to offer the surgeon a tool to determine the proper direction
planes in a previous step before the surgical procedure. This project pretends to give the surgeon an openfree
computational platform to access to patient geometrical and physiological information before involving the
subject in any invasive procedure
Soft tissue structure modelling for use in orthopaedic applications and musculoskeletal biomechanics
We present our methodology for the three-dimensional anatomical and geometrical description of soft tissues, relevant for orthopaedic surgical applications and musculoskeletal biomechanics. The technique involves the segmentation and geometrical description of muscles and neurovascular structures from high-resolution computer tomography scanning for the reconstruction of generic anatomical models. These models can be used for quantitative interpretation of anatomical and biomechanical aspects of different soft tissue structures. This approach should allow the use of these data in other application fields, such as musculoskeletal modelling, simulations for radiation therapy, and databases for use in minimally invasive, navigated and robotic surgery
Neuroimaging of structural pathology and connectomics in traumatic brain injury: Toward personalized outcome prediction.
Recent contributions to the body of knowledge on traumatic brain injury (TBI) favor the view that multimodal neuroimaging using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI and fMRI, respectively) as well as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has excellent potential to identify novel biomarkers and predictors of TBI outcome. This is particularly the case when such methods are appropriately combined with volumetric/morphometric analysis of brain structures and with the exploration of TBI-related changes in brain network properties at the level of the connectome. In this context, our present review summarizes recent developments on the roles of these two techniques in the search for novel structural neuroimaging biomarkers that have TBI outcome prognostication value. The themes being explored cover notable trends in this area of research, including (1) the role of advanced MRI processing methods in the analysis of structural pathology, (2) the use of brain connectomics and network analysis to identify outcome biomarkers, and (3) the application of multivariate statistics to predict outcome using neuroimaging metrics. The goal of the review is to draw the community's attention to these recent advances on TBI outcome prediction methods and to encourage the development of new methodologies whereby structural neuroimaging can be used to identify biomarkers of TBI outcome
Qualitative grading of aortic regurgitation: a pilot study comparing CMR 4D flow and echocardiography.
Over the past 10 years there has been intense research in the development of volumetric visualization of intracardiac flow by cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR).This volumetric time resolved technique called CMR 4D flow imaging has several advantages over standard CMR. It offers anatomical, functional and flow information in a single free-breathing, ten-minute acquisition. However, the data obtained is large and its processing requires dedicated software. We evaluated a cloud-based application package that combines volumetric data correction and visualization of CMR 4D flow data, and assessed its accuracy for the detection and grading of aortic valve regurgitation using transthoracic echocardiography as reference. Between June 2014 and January 2015, patients planned for clinical CMR were consecutively approached to undergo the supplementary CMR 4D flow acquisition. Fifty four patients(median age 39 years, 32 males) were included. Detection and grading of the aortic valve regurgitation using CMR4D flow imaging were evaluated against transthoracic echocardiography. The agreement between 4D flow CMR and transthoracic echocardiography for grading of aortic valve regurgitation was good (j = 0.73). To identify relevant,more than mild aortic valve regurgitation, CMR 4D flow imaging had a sensitivity of 100 % and specificity of 98 %. Aortic regurgitation can be well visualized, in a similar manner as transthoracic echocardiography, when using CMR 4D flow imaging
Software for full-color 3D reconstruction of the biological tissues internal structure
A software for processing sets of full-color images of biological tissue
histological sections is developed. We used histological sections obtained by
the method of high-precision layer-by-layer grinding of frozen biological
tissues. The software allows restoring the image of the tissue for an arbitrary
cross-section of the tissue sample. Thus, our method is designed to create a
full-color 3D reconstruction of the biological tissue structure. The resolution
of 3D reconstruction is determined by the quality of the initial histological
sections. The newly developed technology available to us provides a resolution
of up to 5 - 10 {\mu}m in three dimensions.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure
Coupled non-parametric shape and moment-based inter-shape pose priors for multiple basal ganglia structure segmentation
This paper presents a new active contour-based, statistical method for simultaneous volumetric segmentation of multiple subcortical structures in the brain. In biological tissues, such as the human brain, neighboring structures exhibit co-dependencies which can aid in segmentation, if properly analyzed and modeled. Motivated by this observation, we formulate the segmentation problem as a maximum a posteriori estimation problem, in which we incorporate statistical prior models on the shapes and inter-shape (relative) poses of the structures of interest. This provides a principled mechanism to bring high level information about the shapes and the relationships of anatomical structures into the segmentation problem. For learning the prior densities we use a nonparametric multivariate kernel density estimation framework. We combine these priors with data in a variational framework and develop an active contour-based iterative segmentation algorithm.
We test our method on the problem of volumetric segmentation of basal ganglia structures in magnetic resonance (MR) images.
We present a set of 2D and 3D experiments as well as a quantitative performance analysis. In addition, we perform a comparison to several existent segmentation methods and demonstrate the improvements provided by our approach in terms of segmentation accuracy
Uncovering convolutional neural network decisions for diagnosing multiple sclerosis on conventional MRI using layer-wise relevance propagation
Machine learning-based imaging diagnostics has recently reached or even
superseded the level of clinical experts in several clinical domains. However,
classification decisions of a trained machine learning system are typically
non-transparent, a major hindrance for clinical integration, error tracking or
knowledge discovery. In this study, we present a transparent deep learning
framework relying on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and layer-wise
relevance propagation (LRP) for diagnosing multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is
commonly diagnosed utilizing a combination of clinical presentation and
conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), specifically the occurrence and
presentation of white matter lesions in T2-weighted images. We hypothesized
that using LRP in a naive predictive model would enable us to uncover relevant
image features that a trained CNN uses for decision-making. Since imaging
markers in MS are well-established this would enable us to validate the
respective CNN model. First, we pre-trained a CNN on MRI data from the
Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (n = 921), afterwards specializing
the CNN to discriminate between MS patients and healthy controls (n = 147).
Using LRP, we then produced a heatmap for each subject in the holdout set
depicting the voxel-wise relevance for a particular classification decision.
The resulting CNN model resulted in a balanced accuracy of 87.04% and an area
under the curve of 96.08% in a receiver operating characteristic curve. The
subsequent LRP visualization revealed that the CNN model focuses indeed on
individual lesions, but also incorporates additional information such as lesion
location, non-lesional white matter or gray matter areas such as the thalamus,
which are established conventional and advanced MRI markers in MS. We conclude
that LRP and the proposed framework have the capability to make diagnostic
decisions of..
Neuroconductor: an R platform for medical imaging analysis
Neuroconductor (https://neuroconductor.org) is an open-source platform for rapid testing and dissemination of reproducible computational imaging software. The goals of the project are to: (i) provide a centralized repository of R software dedicated to image analysis, (ii) disseminate software updates quickly, (iii) train a large, diverse community of scientists using detailed tutorials and short courses, (iv) increase software quality via automatic and manual quality controls, and (v) promote reproducibility of image data analysis. Based on the programming language R (https://www.r-project.org/), Neuroconductor starts with 51 inter-operable packages that cover multiple areas of imaging including visualization, data processing and storage, and statistical inference. Neuroconductor accepts new R package submissions, which are subject to a formal review and continuous automated testing. We provide a description of the purpose of Neuroconductor and the user and developer experience
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