DESPECKLEING PROSTATE ULTRASONOGRAMS USING PDE WITH WAVELET

Prostate cancer is the leading cause of death for men, since the cause of the disease is mysterious and its early detection is also monotonous. Ultrasound (US) is the most popular tool to detect the human organ glands and also used to diagnose the prostate cancer. Speckle noise is an inherent nature of ultrasound images, which degrades the image quality. So far, No specific filter is available to suppress the speckle noise in prostate image. In this paper, a novel despeckling method PDE with Wavelet is presented for prostate US images. The enhancement method is evaluated by using standard measures like Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Edge Preservation Index (EPI). Further, the despeckling approaches is also evaluated time and space complexity. From the results, it is observed that the filtering method PDE with Wavelet is superior to PDE in terms of denoising and also preserving the information content

Advancements and Breakthroughs in Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrasonic imaging is a powerful diagnostic tool available to medical practitioners, engineers and researchers today. Due to the relative safety, and the non-invasive nature, ultrasonic imaging has become one of the most rapidly advancing technologies. These rapid advances are directly related to the parallel advancements in electronics, computing, and transducer technology together with sophisticated signal processing techniques. This book focuses on state of the art developments in ultrasonic imaging applications and underlying technologies presented by leading practitioners and researchers from many parts of the world

Automated analysis of ultrasound imaging of muscle and tendon in the upper limb using artificial intelligence methods

Accurate estimation of geometric musculoskeletal parameters from medical imaging has a number of applications in healthcare analysis and modelling. In vivo measurement of key morphological parameters of an individual’s upper limb opens up a new era for the construction of subject-specific models of the shoulder and arm. These models could be used to aid diagnosis of musculoskeletal problems, predict the effects of interventions and assist in the design and development of medical devices. However, these parameters are difficult to evaluate in vivo due to the complicated and inaccessible nature of structures such as muscles and tendons. Ultrasound, as a non-invasive and low-cost imaging technique, has been used in the manual evaluation of parameters such as muscle fibre length, cross sectional area and tendon length. However, the evaluation of ultrasound images depends heavily on the expertise of the operator and is time-consuming. Basing parameter estimation on the properties of the image itself and reducing the reliance on the skill of the operator would allow for automation of the process, speeding up parameter estimation and reducing bias in the final outcome. Key barriers to automation are the presence of speckle noise in the images and low image contrast. This hinders the effectiveness of traditional edge detection and segmentation methods necessary for parameter estimation. Therefore, addressing these limitations is considered pivotal to progress in this area.The aims of this thesis were therefore to develop new methods for the automatic evaluation of these geometric parameters of the upper extremity, and to compare these with manual evaluations. This was done by addressing all stages of the image processing pipeline, and introducing new methods based on artificial intelligence.Speckle noise of musculoskeletal ultrasound images was reduced by successfully applying local adaptive median filtering and anisotropic diffusion filtering. Furthermore, low contrast of the ultrasound image and video was enhanced by developing a new method based on local fuzzy contrast enhancement. Both steps contributed to improving the quality of musculoskeletal ultrasound images to improve the effectiveness of edge detection methods.Subsequently, a new edge detection method based on the fuzzy inference system was developed to outline the necessary details of the musculoskeletal ultrasound images after image enhancement. This step allowed automated segmentation to be used to estimate the morphological parameters of muscles and tendons in the upper extremity.Finally, the automatically estimated geometric parameters, including the thickness and pennation angle of triceps muscle and the cross-sectional area and circumference of the flexor pollicis longus tendon were compared with manually taken measurements from the same ultrasound images.The results show successful performance of the novel methods in the sample population for the muscles and tendons chosen. A larger dataset would help to make the developed methods more robust and more widely applicable.Future work should concentrate on using the developed methods of this thesis to evaluate other geometric parameters of the upper and lower extremities such as automatic evaluation of the muscle fascicle length

Echocardiography

The book "Echocardiography - New Techniques" brings worldwide contributions from highly acclaimed clinical and imaging science investigators, and representatives from academic medical centers. Each chapter is designed and written to be accessible to those with a basic knowledge of echocardiography. Additionally, the chapters are meant to be stimulating and educational to the experts and investigators in the field of echocardiography. This book is aimed primarily at cardiology fellows on their basic echocardiography rotation, fellows in general internal medicine, radiology and emergency medicine, and experts in the arena of echocardiography. Over the last few decades, the rate of technological advancements has developed dramatically, resulting in new techniques and improved echocardiographic imaging. The authors of this book focused on presenting the most advanced techniques useful in today's research and in daily clinical practice. These advanced techniques are utilized in the detection of different cardiac pathologies in patients, in contributing to their clinical decision, as well as follow-up and outcome predictions. In addition to the advanced techniques covered, this book expounds upon several special pathologies with respect to the functions of echocardiography

Computer-aided diagnosis of gynaecological abnormality using B-mode ultrasound images

Ultrasound scan is one of the most reliable imaging for detecting/diagnosing of gynaecological abnormalities. Ultrasound imaging is widely used during pregnancy and has become central in the management of the problems of early pregnancy, particularly in miscarriage diagnosis. Also ultrasound is considered as the most important imaging modality in the evaluation of different types of ovarian tumours. The early detection of ovarian carcinoma and miscarriage continues to be a challenging task. It mostly relies on manual examination, interpretation by gynaecologists, of the ultrasound scan images that may use morphology features extracted from the region of interest. Diagnosis depends on using certain scoring systems that have been devised over a long time. The manual diagnostic process involves multiple subjective decisions, with increased inter- and intra-observer variations which may lead to serious errors and health implications. This thesis is devoted to developing computer-based tools that use ultrasound scan images for automatic classification of Ovarian Tumours (Benign or Malignant) and automatic detection of Miscarriage cases at early stages of pregnancy. Our intended computational tools are meant to help gynaecologists to improve accuracy of their diagnostic decisions, while serving as a tool for training radiology students/trainees on diagnosing gynaecological abnormalities. Ultimately, it is hoped that the developed techniques can be integrated into a specialised gynaecology Decision Support System. Our approach is to deal with this problem by adopting a standard image-based pattern recognition research framework that involve the extraction of appropriate feature vector modelling of the investigated tumours, select appropriate classifiers, and test the performance of such schemes using sufficiently large and relevant datasets of ultrasound scan images. We aim to complement the automation of certain parameters that gynaecologist experts and radiologists manually determine, by image-content information attributes that may not be directly accessible without advanced image transformations. This is motivated by, and benefit from, advances in computer vision that led the emergence of a variety of image processing/analysis techniques together with recent advances in data mining and machine learning technologies. An expert observer makes a diagnostic decision with a level of certainty, and if not entirely certain about their diagnostic decisions then often other experts’ opinions are sought and may be essential for diagnosing difficult “Inconclusive cases”. Here we define a quantitative measure of confidence in decisions made by automatic diagnostic schemes, independent of accuracy of decision. In the rest of the thesis, we report on the development of a variety of innovative diagnostic schemes and demonstrate their performances using extensive experimental work. The following is a summary of the main contributions made in this thesis. 1. Using a combination of spatial domain filters and operations as pre-processing procedures to enhance ultrasound images for both applications, namely miscarriage identification and ovarian tumour diagnosis. We show that the Non-local means filter is effective in reducing speckle noise from ultrasound images, and together with other filters we succeed in enhancing the inner border of malignant tumours and reliably segmenting the gestational sac. 2. Developing reliable automated procedures to extract several types of features to model gestational sac dimensional measurements, few of which are manually determined by radiologist and used by gynaecologists to identify miscarriage cases. We demonstrate that the corresponding automatic diagnostic schemes yield excellent accuracy when classified by the k-Nearest Neighbours. 3. Developing several local as well as global image-texture based features in the spatial as well as the frequency domains. The spatial domain features include the local versions of image histograms, first order statistical features and versions of local binary patterns. From the frequency domain, we propose a novel set of Fast Fourier Geometrical Features that encapsulates the image texture information that depends on all image pixel values. We demonstrate that each of these features define Ovarian Tumour diagnostic scheme that have relatively high power of discriminating Benign from Malignant tumours when classified by Support Vector Machine. We show that the Fast Fourier Geometrical Features are the best performing scheme achieving more than 85% accuracy. 4. Introducing a simple measure of confidence to quantify the goodness of the automatic diagnostic decision, regardless of decision accuracy, to emulate real life medical diagnostics. Experimental work in this theis demonstrate a strong link between this measure and accuracy rate, so that low level of confidence could raise an alarm. 5. Conducting sufficiently intensive investigations of fusion models of multi-feature schemes at different level. We show that feature level fusion yields degraded performance compared to all its single components, while score level fusion results in improved results and decision level fusion of three sets of features using majority rule is slightly less successful. Using the measure of confidence is useful in resolving conflicts when two sets of features are fused at the decision level. This leads to the emergence of a Not Sure decision which is common in medical practice. Considering the Not Sure label is a good practice and an incentive to conduct more tests, rather than misclassification, which leads to significantly improved accuracy. The thesis concludes with an intensive discussion on future work that would go beyond improving performance of the developed scheme to deal with the corresponding multi-class diagnostics essential for a comprehensive gynaecology Decision Support System tool as the ultimate goal

New developments in Stimulated Raman Scattering and applications to plastic particle detection in the environment and human tissue

This thesis deals with an advanced laser-based microscopy technique to detect micrometer-size objects with molecular specificity. Applications are shown from the aquatic environment and from the medical world. The final chapters describe an option to increase the penetration depth through scattering samples and simulation software to help optimize the measurement settings. One of the most prominent materials in modern life is plastic, but this also results in the large-scale production of plastic waste. A portion of this waste reaches the environment and is fragmented into small pieces, called microplastics. Microplastics pollution affects the environment and potentially our health in ways we are only beginning to understand. To study it, we need to have a solid measurement and monitoring platform, based on reliable microplastics detection. Detection of microplastics is difficult due to their small size and heterogeneity and they can be found in different types of matrices in the environment and even in the human body. A label-free microscopy imaging technique, called Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscopy, is able to create images of small particles, like microplastics, based on their molecular structure. SRS makes use of two synchronized pulsed lasers of different colors, of which the energy difference matches a specific vibration of the target molecule. In this thesis, we used SRS for identifying five polymer types. First, we tested the approach on an artificial mixture of plastic particles, and we identified polyethylene terephthalate particles extracted from nail polish, demonstrating also the thousand‐fold higher speed of mapping compared with conventional Raman. Furthermore, we found 12,000 plastic particles per kilogram dry weight in a Rhine estuary sediment sample. SRS was the fastest microplastics detection method at the time of publication. We concluded that SRS can be an efficient method for monitoring microplastics in the environment and potentially many other matrices of interest. Another application area that was studied with SRS is breast tissue from explanted breast implants. Implant failure occurs in approximately a tenth of patients within 10 years, and even without a major rupture silicone can still leak. We showed how SRS can detect silicone material in breast tissue slices, without additional sample treatment. SRS images revealed the distribution and quantity of silicone material. Twenty-two donor-matched capsules from eleven patients experiencing unilateral capsular contraction complaints were included in a clinical study after bilateral explantation surgery. This method showed the correlation between silicone presence and capsular contraction. Depth penetration of the light into the sample is an issue with any light based technique. We showed the use of a long wavelength SRS microscope system capable of greater depth imaging compared with the more common configuration with shorter wavelengths. It showed an improved depth penetration in polyethylene plastic material, in a silicone test sample with embedded polyethylene microbeads, and into subcutaneous fat tissue. In SRS imaging we have to consider multiple parameters that influence the imaging speed, image quality and the spatial resolution. In order to find the optimized imaging setup, we developed two simulation programs for SRS imaging systems with lock-in amplifier. One simulation program was used to find parameters optimized for either image quality or acquisition time. With the second program we evaluated SRS imaging; the simulations agreed very well with experimental SRS images. The same software was used to simulate multiplexed SRS imaging. of six channels, including the inter-channel crosstalk. These programs will be useful for operating an SRS imaging setup, as well as for designing novel setups