398 research outputs found
An image segmentation and registration approach to cardiac function analysis using MRI
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are one of the major causes of death in the world. In recent
years, significant progress has been made in the care and treatment of patients with such
diseases. A crucial factor for this progress has been the development of magnetic resonance
(MR) imaging which makes it possible to diagnose and assess the cardiovascular function
of the patient. The ability to obtain high-resolution, cine volume images easily and safely
has made it the preferred method for diagnosis of CVDs. MRI is also unique in its ability
to introduce noninvasive markers directly into the tissue being imaged(MR tagging) during
the image acquisition process. With the development of advanced MR imaging acquisition
technologies, 3D MR imaging is more and more clinically feasible. This recent development has
allowed new potentially 3D image analysis technologies to be deployed. However, quantitative
analysis of cardiovascular system from the images remains a challenging topic.
The work presented in this thesis describes the development of segmentation and motion
analysis techniques for the study of the cardiac anatomy and function in cardiac magnetic
resonance (CMR) images. The first main contribution of the thesis is the development of a fully
automatic cardiac segmentation technique that integrates and combines a series of state-of-the-art
techniques. The proposed segmentation technique is capable of generating an accurate 3D
segmentation from multiple image sequences. The proposed segmentation technique is robust
even in the presence of pathological changes, large anatomical shape variations and locally
varying contrast in the images.
Another main contribution of this thesis is the development of motion tracking techniques that
can integrate motion information from different sources. For example, the radial motion of
the myocardium can be tracked easily in untagged MR imaging since the epi- and endocardial
surfaces are clearly visible. On the other hand, tagged MR imaging allows easy tracking of
both longitudinal and circumferential motion. We propose a novel technique based on non-rigid
image registration for the myocardial motion estimation using both untagged and 3D tagged MR
images. The novel aspect of our technique is its simultaneous use of complementary information
from both untagged and 3D tagged MR imaging. The similarity measure is spatially weighted
to maximise the utility of information from both images.
The thesis also proposes a sparse representation for free-form deformations (FFDs) using the principles of compressed sensing. The sparse free-form deformation (SFFD) model can
capture fine local details such as motion discontinuities without sacrificing robustness. We
demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed framework to accurately estimate smooth as well
as discontinuous deformations in 2D and 3D CMR image sequences. Compared to the standard
FFD approach, a significant increase in registration accuracy can be observed in datasets with
discontinuous motion patterns.
Both the segmentation and motion tracking techniques presented in this thesis have been
applied to clinical studies. We focus on two important clinical applications that can be
addressed by the techniques proposed in this thesis. The first clinical application aims
at measuring longitudinal changes in cardiac morphology and function during the cardiac
remodelling process. The second clinical application aims at selecting patients that positively
respond to cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT).
The final chapter of this thesis summarises the main conclusions that can be drawn from the
work presented here and also discusses possible avenues for future research
Real-time 3D reconstruction of non-rigid shapes with a single moving camera
© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This paper describes a real-time sequential method to simultaneously recover the camera motion and the 3D shape of deformable objects from a calibrated monocular video. For this purpose, we consider the Navier-Cauchy equations used in 3D linear elasticity and solved by finite elements, to model the time-varying shape per frame. These equations are embedded in an extended Kalman filter, resulting in sequential Bayesian estimation approach. We represent the shape, with unknown material properties, as a combination of elastic elements whose nodal points correspond to salient points in the image. The global rigidity of the shape is encoded by a stiffness matrix, computed after assembling each of these elements. With this piecewise model, we can linearly relate the 3D displacements with the 3D acting forces that cause the object deformation, assumed to be normally distributed. While standard finite-element-method techniques require imposing boundary conditions to solve the resulting linear system, in this work we eliminate this requirement by modeling the compliance matrix with a generalized pseudoinverse that enforces a pre-fixed rank. Our framework also ensures surface continuity without the need for a post-processing step to stitch all the piecewise reconstructions into a global smooth shape. We present experimental results using both synthetic and real videos for different scenarios ranging from isometric to elastic deformations. We also show the consistency of the estimation with respect to 3D ground truth data, include several experiments assessing robustness against artifacts and finally, provide an experimental validation of our performance in real time at frame rate for small mapsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Feature Tracking Cardiac Magnetic Resonance via Deep Learning and Spline Optimization
Feature tracking Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) has recently emerged as an
area of interest for quantification of regional cardiac function from balanced,
steady state free precession (SSFP) cine sequences. However, currently
available techniques lack full automation, limiting reproducibility. We propose
a fully automated technique whereby a CMR image sequence is first segmented
with a deep, fully convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture, and
quadratic basis splines are fitted simultaneously across all cardiac frames
using least squares optimization. Experiments are performed using data from 42
patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and 21 healthy control
subjects. In terms of segmentation, we compared state-of-the-art CNN
frameworks, U-Net and dilated convolution architectures, with and without
temporal context, using cross validation with three folds. Performance relative
to expert manual segmentation was similar across all networks: pixel accuracy
was ~97%, intersection-over-union (IoU) across all classes was ~87%, and IoU
across foreground classes only was ~85%. Endocardial left ventricular
circumferential strain calculated from the proposed pipeline was significantly
different in control and disease subjects (-25.3% vs -29.1%, p = 0.006), in
agreement with the current clinical literature.Comment: Accepted to Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart (FIMH) 201
Video Compressive Sensing for Dynamic MRI
We present a video compressive sensing framework, termed kt-CSLDS, to
accelerate the image acquisition process of dynamic magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI). We are inspired by a state-of-the-art model for video compressive
sensing that utilizes a linear dynamical system (LDS) to model the motion
manifold. Given compressive measurements, the state sequence of an LDS can be
first estimated using system identification techniques. We then reconstruct the
observation matrix using a joint structured sparsity assumption. In particular,
we minimize an objective function with a mixture of wavelet sparsity and joint
sparsity within the observation matrix. We derive an efficient convex
optimization algorithm through alternating direction method of multipliers
(ADMM), and provide a theoretical guarantee for global convergence. We
demonstrate the performance of our approach for video compressive sensing, in
terms of reconstruction accuracy. We also investigate the impact of various
sampling strategies. We apply this framework to accelerate the acquisition
process of dynamic MRI and show it achieves the best reconstruction accuracy
with the least computational time compared with existing algorithms in the
literature.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure
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