Advanced signal processing methods in dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging

Tato dizertační práce představuje metodu zobrazování perfúze magnetickou rezonancí, jež je výkonným nástrojem v diagnostice, především v onkologii. Po ukončení sběru časové sekvence T1-váhovaných obrazů zaznamenávajících distribuci kontrastní látky v těle začíná fáze zpracování dat, která je předmětem této dizertace. Je zde představen teoretický základ fyziologických modelů a modelů akvizice pomocí magnetické rezonance a celý řetězec potřebný k vytvoření obrazů odhadu parametrů perfúze a mikrocirkulace v tkáni. Tato dizertační práce je souborem uveřejněných prací autora přispívajícím k rozvoji metodologie perfúzního zobrazování a zmíněného potřebného teoretického rozboru.This dissertation describes quantitative dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI), which is a powerful tool in diagnostics, mainly in oncology. After a time series of T1-weighted images recording contrast-agent distribution in the body has been acquired, data processing phase follows. It is presented step by step in this dissertation. The theoretical background in physiological and MRI-acquisition modeling is described together with the estimation process leading to parametric maps describing perfusion and microcirculation properties of the investigated tissue on a voxel-by-voxel basis. The dissertation is divided into this theoretical analysis and a set of publications representing particular contributions of the author to DCE-MRI.

Superresolution imaging: A survey of current techniques

Cristóbal, G., Gil, E., Šroubek, F., Flusser, J., Miravet, C., Rodríguez, F. B., “Superresolution imaging: A survey of current techniques”, Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering, 7074, 2008. Copyright 2008. Society of Photo Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.Imaging plays a key role in many diverse areas of application, such as astronomy, remote sensing, microscopy, and tomography. Owing to imperfections of measuring devices (e.g., optical degradations, limited size of sensors) and instability of the observed scene (e.g., object motion, media turbulence), acquired images can be indistinct, noisy, and may exhibit insufficient spatial and temporal resolution. In particular, several external effects blur images. Techniques for recovering the original image include blind deconvolution (to remove blur) and superresolution (SR). The stability of these methods depends on having more than one image of the same frame. Differences between images are necessary to provide new information, but they can be almost unperceivable. State-of-the-art SR techniques achieve remarkable results in resolution enhancement by estimating the subpixel shifts between images, but they lack any apparatus for calculating the blurs. In this paper, after introducing a review of current SR techniques we describe two recently developed SR methods by the authors. First, we introduce a variational method that minimizes a regularized energy function with respect to the high resolution image and blurs. In this way we establish a unifying way to simultaneously estimate the blurs and the high resolution image. By estimating blurs we automatically estimate shifts with subpixel accuracy, which is inherent for good SR performance. Second, an innovative learning-based algorithm using a neural architecture for SR is described. Comparative experiments on real data illustrate the robustness and utilization of both methods.This research has been partially supported by the following grants: TEC2007-67025/TCM, TEC2006-28009-E, BFI-2003-07276, TIN-2004-04363-C03-03 by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and by PROFIT projects FIT-070000-2003-475 and FIT-330100-2004-91. Also, this work has been partially supported by the Czech Ministry of Education under the project No. 1M0572 (Research Center DAR) and by the Czech Science Foundation under the project No. GACR 102/08/1593 and the CSIC-CAS bilateral project 2006CZ002

Structured Sparsity Models for Multiparty Speech Recovery from Reverberant Recordings

We tackle the multi-party speech recovery problem through modeling the acoustic of the reverberant chambers. Our approach exploits structured sparsity models to perform room modeling and speech recovery. We propose a scheme for characterizing the room acoustic from the unknown competing speech sources relying on localization of the early images of the speakers by sparse approximation of the spatial spectra of the virtual sources in a free-space model. The images are then clustered exploiting the low-rank structure of the spectro-temporal components belonging to each source. This enables us to identify the early support of the room impulse response function and its unique map to the room geometry. To further tackle the ambiguity of the reflection ratios, we propose a novel formulation of the reverberation model and estimate the absorption coefficients through a convex optimization exploiting joint sparsity model formulated upon spatio-spectral sparsity of concurrent speech representation. The acoustic parameters are then incorporated for separating individual speech signals through either structured sparse recovery or inverse filtering the acoustic channels. The experiments conducted on real data recordings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for multi-party speech recovery and recognition.Comment: 31 page

Efficient methodologies for real-time image restoration

In this thesis we investigate the problem of image restoration. The main focus of our research is to come up with novel algorithms and enhance existing techniques in order to deliver efficient and effective methodologies, applicable in real-time image restoration scenarios. Our research starts with a literature review, which identifies the gaps in existing techniques and helps us to come up with a novel classification on image restoration, which integrates and discusses more recent developments in the area of image restoration. With this novel classification, we identified three major areas which need our attention. The first developments relate to non-blind image restoration. The two mostly used techniques, namely deterministic linear algorithms and stochastic nonlinear algorithms are compared and contrasted. Under deterministic linear algorithms, we develop a class of more effective novel quadratic linear regularization models, which outperform the existing linear regularization models. In addition, by looking in a new perspective, we evaluate and compare the performance of deterministic and stochastic restoration algorithms and explore the validity of the performance claims made so far on those algorithms. Further, we critically challenge the ne- cessity of some complex mechanisms in Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) technique under stochastic image deconvolution algorithms. The next developments are focussed in blind image restoration, which is claimed to be more challenging. Constant Modulus Algorithm (CMA) is one of the most popular, computationally simple, tested and best performing blind equalization algorithms in the signal processing domain. In our research, we extend the use of CMA in image restoration and develop a broad class of blind image deconvolution algorithms, in particular algorithms for blurring kernels with a separable property. These algorithms show significantly faster convergence than conventional algorithms. Although CMA method has a proven record in signal processing applications related to data communications systems, no research has been carried out to the investigation of the applicability of CMA for image restoration in practice. In filling this gap and taking into account the differences of signal processing in im- age processing and data communications contexts, we extend our research on the applicability of CMA deconvolution under the assumptions on the ground truth image properties. Through analyzing the main assumptions of ground truth image properties being zero-mean, independent and uniformly distributed, which char- acterize the convergence of CMA deconvolution, we develop a novel technique to overcome the effects of image source correlation based on segmentation and higher order moments of the source. Multichannel image restoration techniques recently gained much attention over the single channel image restoration due to the benefits of diversity and redundancy of the information between the channels. Exploiting these benefits in real time applications is often restricted due to the unavailability of multiple copies of the same image. In order to overcome this limitation, as the last area of our research, we develop a novel multichannel blind restoration model with a single image, which eliminates the constraint of the necessity of multiple copies of the blurred image. We consider this as a major contribution which could be extended to wider areas of research integrated with multiple disciplines such as demosaicing

Convolutive Blind Source Separation Methods

In this chapter, we provide an overview of existing algorithms for blind source separation of convolutive audio mixtures. We provide a taxonomy, wherein many of the existing algorithms can be organized, and we present published results from those algorithms that have been applied to real-world audio separation tasks

Frequency-domain implementation of block adaptive filters for ICA-based multichannel blind deconvolution+I3055

In this paper, we present frequency-domain implementations of two adaptive multichannel blind deconvolution filters that employ the independent component analysis principle. The proposed implementations achieve considerable computational gains, which is shown by performing detailed analysis on the computational complexity. Particularly, our implementations incorporate a nonholonomic constraint to deal with overdetermined cases. The developed algorithms were successfully applied to the blind separation of real-world speech signals

Image formation in synthetic aperture radio telescopes

Next generation radio telescopes will be much larger, more sensitive, have much larger observation bandwidth and will be capable of pointing multiple beams simultaneously. Obtaining the sensitivity, resolution and dynamic range supported by the receivers requires the development of new signal processing techniques for array and atmospheric calibration as well as new imaging techniques that are both more accurate and computationally efficient since data volumes will be much larger. This paper provides a tutorial overview of existing image formation techniques and outlines some of the future directions needed for information extraction from future radio telescopes. We describe the imaging process from measurement equation until deconvolution, both as a Fourier inversion problem and as an array processing estimation problem. The latter formulation enables the development of more advanced techniques based on state of the art array processing. We demonstrate the techniques on simulated and measured radio telescope data.Comment: 12 page