1,438 research outputs found
Mechanistic and pathological study of the genesis, growth, and rupture of abdominal aortic aneurysms
Postprint (published version
Trainable COSFIRE filters for vessel delineation with application to retinal images
Retinal imaging provides a non-invasive opportunity for the diagnosis of several medical pathologies. The automatic segmentation of the vessel tree is an important pre-processing step which facilitates subsequent automatic processes that contribute to such diagnosis. We introduce a novel method for the automatic segmentation of vessel trees in retinal fundus images. We propose a filter that selectively responds to vessels and that we call B-COSFIRE with B standing for bar which is an abstraction for a vessel. It is based on the existing COSFIRE (Combination Of Shifted Filter Responses) approach. A B-COSFIRE filter achieves orientation selectivity by computing the weighted geometric mean of the output of a pool of Difference-of-Gaussians filters, whose supports are aligned in a collinear manner. It achieves rotation invariance efficiently by simple shifting operations. The proposed filter is versatile as its selectivity is determined from any given vessel-like prototype pattern in an automatic configuration process. We configure two B-COSFIRE filters, namely symmetric and asymmetric, that are selective for bars and bar-endings, respectively. We achieve vessel segmentation by summing up the responses of the two rotation-invariant B-COSFIRE filters followed by thresholding. The results that we achieve on three publicly available data sets (DRIVE: Se = 0.7655, Sp = 0.9704; STARE: Se = 0.7716, Sp = 0.9701; CHASE_DB1: Se = 0.7585, Sp = 0.9587) are higher than many of the state-of-the-art methods. The proposed segmentation approach is also very efficient with a time complexity that is significantly lower than existing methods.peer-reviewe
Automated methods for quantifying the tortuosity of microvascular networks
2012 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.Networks of microscopic blood vessels can be studied for changes in morphology that correlate with biological abnormalities. Tortuosity, or vessel twistiness, is one of these morphological properties, and it can be surprisingly difficult to quantify. The purpose of this thesis is to present the development, testing, and analysis of new automated methods to measure and quantify the tortuosity of microvascular networks. We will explain necessary automated image processing techniques and background information before presenting our new metrics for measuring network tortuosity. Experiments using the methods will be presented, including a full analysis of the results. We will use the results from these experiments to justify our final conclusions and recommendations regarding the performance of the methods
Tortuosity and other vessel attributes for arterioles and venules of the human cerebral cortex
Despite its demonstrated potential in the diagnosis and/or staging of disease, especially in oncology, tortuosity has not received a formal and unambiguous clinical definition yet. Using idealized three-dimensional vessel models (wavy helices) with known characteristics, we first demonstrate that, among various possible tortuosity indices, the standard deviation of the curvature Ksd best satisfies i) scale invariance and ii) positive monotonic response with respect to the amplitude and frequency of vessel oscillations. Ksd can thus be considered as a robust measure of tortuosity. On the contrary, indices previously considered as tortuosity metrics, such as the distance factor metrics (DFM), are highly scale dependent and inappropriate for that purpose. The tortuosity and other vessel attributes (curvature, length-to-diameter ratio (LDR),…) of more than 15,000 cortical vessels are subsequently studied, establishing their statistical properties as a function of the vessel nature (arterioles versus venules) or topological order (hierarchical position). In particular, arterioles have a higher LDR than venules, but the two kinds of vessels have the same mean curvature and tortuosity.Moreover, the lower the order of the vessels, i.e. the nearer to the capillary network, the more curved and tortuous they are. These results provide an essential reference both for diagnosis and for a future large reconstruction of the cerebral microvascular network
Gap Filling of 3-D Microvascular Networks by Tensor Voting
We present a new algorithm which merges discontinuities in 3-D images of tubular structures presenting undesirable gaps. The application of the proposed method is mainly associated to large 3-D images of microvascular networks. In order to recover the real network topology, we need to fill the gaps between the closest discontinuous vessels. The algorithm presented in this paper aims at achieving this goal. This algorithm is based on the skeletonization of the segmented network followed by a tensor voting method. It permits to merge the most common kinds of discontinuities found in microvascular networks. It is robust, easy to use, and relatively fast. The microvascular network images were obtained using synchrotron tomography imaging at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. These images exhibit samples of intracortical networks. Representative results are illustrated
Deep convolutional neural networks for segmenting 3D in vivo multiphoton images of vasculature in Alzheimer disease mouse models
The health and function of tissue rely on its vasculature network to provide
reliable blood perfusion. Volumetric imaging approaches, such as multiphoton
microscopy, are able to generate detailed 3D images of blood vessels that could
contribute to our understanding of the role of vascular structure in normal
physiology and in disease mechanisms. The segmentation of vessels, a core image
analysis problem, is a bottleneck that has prevented the systematic comparison
of 3D vascular architecture across experimental populations. We explored the
use of convolutional neural networks to segment 3D vessels within volumetric in
vivo images acquired by multiphoton microscopy. We evaluated different network
architectures and machine learning techniques in the context of this
segmentation problem. We show that our optimized convolutional neural network
architecture, which we call DeepVess, yielded a segmentation accuracy that was
better than both the current state-of-the-art and a trained human annotator,
while also being orders of magnitude faster. To explore the effects of aging
and Alzheimer's disease on capillaries, we applied DeepVess to 3D images of
cortical blood vessels in young and old mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and
wild type littermates. We found little difference in the distribution of
capillary diameter or tortuosity between these groups, but did note a decrease
in the number of longer capillary segments () in aged animals as
compared to young, in both wild type and Alzheimer's disease mouse models.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure
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
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