12,334 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
Hybrid model for vascular tree structures
This paper proposes a new representation scheme of the cerebral blood
vessels. This model provides information on the semantics of the
vascular structure: the topological relationships between vessels and
the labeling of vascular accidents such as aneurysms and stenoses.
In addition, the model keeps information of the inner surface geometry
as well as of the vascular map volume properties, i.e. the tissue
density, the blood flow velocity and the vessel wall elasticity.
The model can be constructed automatically in a pre-process from a set
of segmented MRA images. Its memory requirements are optimized on the
basis of the sparseness of the vascular structure. It allows fast
queries and efficient traversals and navigations. The visualizations
of the vessel surface can be performed at different levels of
detail. The direct rendering of the volume is fast because the model
provides a natural way to skip over empty data.
The paper analyzes the memory requirements of the model along with the
costs of the most important operations on it.Postprint (published version
Pushing the Limits of 3D Color Printing: Error Diffusion with Translucent Materials
Accurate color reproduction is important in many applications of 3D printing,
from design prototypes to 3D color copies or portraits. Although full color is
available via other technologies, multi-jet printers have greater potential for
graphical 3D printing, in terms of reproducing complex appearance properties.
However, to date these printers cannot produce full color, and doing so poses
substantial technical challenges, from the shear amount of data to the
translucency of the available color materials. In this paper, we propose an
error diffusion halftoning approach to achieve full color with multi-jet
printers, which operates on multiple isosurfaces or layers within the object.
We propose a novel traversal algorithm for voxel surfaces, which allows the
transfer of existing error diffusion algorithms from 2D printing. The resulting
prints faithfully reproduce colors, color gradients and fine-scale details.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures; includes supplemental figure
Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts
This tutorial summarises our uses of reflectance transformation imaging in archaeological contexts. It introduces the UK AHRC funded project reflectance Transformation Imaging for Anciant Documentary Artefacts and demonstrates imaging methodologies
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