662 research outputs found
Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates
The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for
the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This
dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral
anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been
developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data.
To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image
analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral
vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from
automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature
registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of-
Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets.
To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation
and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal
cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain
because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels
containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The
neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel
expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled
partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit
surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in
neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed
landmark study.
To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm
for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted
cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form
deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using
data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local
changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus
Extension of information geometry for modelling non-statistical systems
In this dissertation, an abstract formalism extending information geometry is
introduced. This framework encompasses a broad range of modelling problems,
including possible applications in machine learning and in the information
theoretical foundations of quantum theory. Its purely geometrical foundations
make no use of probability theory and very little assumptions about the data or
the models are made. Starting only from a divergence function, a Riemannian
geometrical structure consisting of a metric tensor and an affine connection is
constructed and its properties are investigated. Also the relation to
information geometry and in particular the geometry of exponential families of
probability distributions is elucidated. It turns out this geometrical
framework offers a straightforward way to determine whether or not a
parametrised family of distributions can be written in exponential form. Apart
from the main theoretical chapter, the dissertation also contains a chapter of
examples illustrating the application of the formalism and its geometric
properties, a brief introduction to differential geometry and a historical
overview of the development of information geometry.Comment: PhD thesis, University of Antwerp, Advisors: Prof. dr. Jan Naudts and
Prof. dr. Jacques Tempere, December 2014, 108 page
Tracking control with adaption of kites
A novel tracking paradigm for flying geometric trajectories using tethered
kites is presented. It is shown how the differential-geometric notion of
turning angle can be used as a one-dimensional representation of the kite
trajectory, and how this leads to a single-input single-output (SISO) tracking
problem. Based on this principle a Lyapunov-based nonlinear adaptive controller
is developed that only needs control derivatives of the kite aerodynamic model.
The resulting controller is validated using simulations with a point-mass kite
model.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figure
Courbure discrète : théorie et applications
International audienceThe present volume contains the proceedings of the 2013 Meeting on discrete curvature, held at CIRM, Luminy, France. The aim of this meeting was to bring together researchers from various backgrounds, ranging from mathematics to computer science, with a focus on both theory and applications. With 27 invited talks and 8 posters, the conference attracted 70 researchers from all over the world. The challenge of finding a common ground on the topic of discrete curvature was met with success, and these proceedings are a testimony of this wor
Convexity preserving interpolatory subdivision with conic precision
The paper is concerned with the problem of shape preserving interpolatory
subdivision. For arbitrarily spaced, planar input data an efficient non-linear
subdivision algorithm is presented that results in limit curves,
reproduces conic sections and respects the convexity properties of the initial
data. Significant numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the
proposed method
Statistical computing on manifolds: from Riemannian geometry to computational anatomy
International audienceComputational anatomy is an emerging discipline that aims at analyzing and modeling the individual anatomy of organs and their biological variability across a population. The goal is not only to model the normal variations among a population, but also discover morphological differences between normal and pathological populations, and possibly to detect, model and classify the pathologies from structural abnormalities. Applications are very important both in neuroscience, to minimize the influence of the anatomical variability in functional group analysis, and in medical imaging, to better drive the adaptation of generic models of the anatomy (atlas) into patient-specific data (personalization).However, understanding and modeling the shape of organs is made difficult by the absence of physical models for comparing different subjects, the complexity of shapes, and the high number of degrees of freedom implied. Moreover, the geometric nature of the anatomical features usually extracted raises the need for statistics and computational methods on objects that do not belong to standard Euclidean spaces. We investigate in this chapter the Riemannian metric as a basis for developing generic algorithms to compute on manifolds. We show that few computational tools derived from this structure can be used in practice as the atoms to build more complex generic algorithms such as mean computation, Mahalanobis distance, interpolation, filtering and anisotropic diffusion on fields of geometric features. This computational framework is illustrated with the joint estimation and anisotropic smoothing of diffusion tensor images and with the modeling of the brain variability from sulcal lines
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Geometric Numerical Integration (hybrid meeting)
The topics of the workshop
included interactions between geometric numerical integration and numerical partial differential equations;
geometric aspects of stochastic differential equations;
interaction with optimisation and machine learning;
new applications of geometric integration in physics;
problems of discrete geometry, integrability, and algebraic aspects
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