22,103 research outputs found
Shearlet-based compressed sensing for fast 3D cardiac MR imaging using iterative reweighting
High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) cardiovascular magnetic resonance
(CMR) is a valuable medical imaging technique, but its widespread application
in clinical practice is hampered by long acquisition times. Here we present a
novel compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction approach using shearlets as a
sparsifying transform allowing for fast 3D CMR (3DShearCS). Shearlets are
mathematically optimal for a simplified model of natural images and have been
proven to be more efficient than classical systems such as wavelets. Data is
acquired with a 3D Radial Phase Encoding (RPE) trajectory and an iterative
reweighting scheme is used during image reconstruction to ensure fast
convergence and high image quality. In our in-vivo cardiac MRI experiments we
show that the proposed method 3DShearCS has lower relative errors and higher
structural similarity compared to the other reconstruction techniques
especially for high undersampling factors, i.e. short scan times. In this
paper, we further show that 3DShearCS provides improved depiction of cardiac
anatomy (measured by assessing the sharpness of coronary arteries) and two
clinical experts qualitatively analyzed the image quality
Linear chemically sensitive electron tomography using DualEELS and dictionary-based compressed sensing
We have investigated the use of DualEELS in elementally sensitive tilt series tomography in the scanning transmission electron microscope. A procedure is implemented using deconvolution to remove the effects of multiple scattering, followed by normalisation by the zero loss peak intensity. This is performed to produce a signal that is linearly dependent on the projected density of the element in each pixel. This method is compared with one that does not include deconvolution (although normalisation by the zero loss peak intensity is still performed). Additionaly, we compare the 3D reconstruction using a new compressed sensing algorithm, DLET, with the well-established SIRT algorithm. VC precipitates, which are extracted from a steel on a carbon replica, are used in this study. It is found that the use of this linear signal results in a very even density throughout the precipitates. However, when deconvolution is omitted, a slight density reduction is observed in the cores of the precipitates (a so-called cupping artefact). Additionally, it is clearly demonstrated that the 3D morphology is much better reproduced using the DLET algorithm, with very little elongation in the missing wedge direction. It is therefore concluded that reliable elementally sensitive tilt tomography using EELS requires the appropriate use of DualEELS together with a suitable reconstruction algorithm, such as the compressed sensing based reconstruction algorithm used here, to make the best use of the limited data volume and signal to noise inherent in core-loss EELS
MedGAN: Medical Image Translation using GANs
Image-to-image translation is considered a new frontier in the field of
medical image analysis, with numerous potential applications. However, a large
portion of recent approaches offers individualized solutions based on
specialized task-specific architectures or require refinement through
non-end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose a new framework, named
MedGAN, for medical image-to-image translation which operates on the image
level in an end-to-end manner. MedGAN builds upon recent advances in the field
of generative adversarial networks (GANs) by merging the adversarial framework
with a new combination of non-adversarial losses. We utilize a discriminator
network as a trainable feature extractor which penalizes the discrepancy
between the translated medical images and the desired modalities. Moreover,
style-transfer losses are utilized to match the textures and fine-structures of
the desired target images to the translated images. Additionally, we present a
new generator architecture, titled CasNet, which enhances the sharpness of the
translated medical outputs through progressive refinement via encoder-decoder
pairs. Without any application-specific modifications, we apply MedGAN on three
different tasks: PET-CT translation, correction of MR motion artefacts and PET
image denoising. Perceptual analysis by radiologists and quantitative
evaluations illustrate that the MedGAN outperforms other existing translation
approaches.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure
Highly automatic quantification of myocardial oedema in patients with acute myocardial infarction using bright blood T2-weighted CMR
<p>Background: T2-weighted cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is clinically-useful for imaging the ischemic area-at-risk and amount of salvageable myocardium in patients with acute myocardial infarction (MI). However, to date, quantification of oedema is user-defined and potentially subjective.</p>
<p>Methods: We describe a highly automatic framework for quantifying myocardial oedema from bright blood T2-weighted CMR in patients with acute MI. Our approach retains user input (i.e. clinical judgment) to confirm the presence of oedema on an image which is then subjected to an automatic analysis. The new method was tested on 25 consecutive acute MI patients who had a CMR within 48 hours of hospital admission. Left ventricular wall boundaries were delineated automatically by variational level set methods followed by automatic detection of myocardial oedema by fitting a Rayleigh-Gaussian mixture statistical model. These data were compared with results from manual segmentation of the left ventricular wall and oedema, the current standard approach.</p>
<p>Results: The mean perpendicular distances between automatically detected left ventricular boundaries and corresponding manual delineated boundaries were in the range of 1-2 mm. Dice similarity coefficients for agreement (0=no agreement, 1=perfect agreement) between manual delineation and automatic segmentation of the left ventricular wall boundaries and oedema regions were 0.86 and 0.74, respectively.</p>
Automatic 3D bi-ventricular segmentation of cardiac images by a shape-refined multi-task deep learning approach
Deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance in
cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) image segmentation. However, most approaches
have focused on learning image intensity features for segmentation, whereas the
incorporation of anatomical shape priors has received less attention. In this
paper, we combine a multi-task deep learning approach with atlas propagation to
develop a shape-constrained bi-ventricular segmentation pipeline for short-axis
CMR volumetric images. The pipeline first employs a fully convolutional network
(FCN) that learns segmentation and landmark localisation tasks simultaneously.
The architecture of the proposed FCN uses a 2.5D representation, thus combining
the computational advantage of 2D FCNs networks and the capability of
addressing 3D spatial consistency without compromising segmentation accuracy.
Moreover, the refinement step is designed to explicitly enforce a shape
constraint and improve segmentation quality. This step is effective for
overcoming image artefacts (e.g. due to different breath-hold positions and
large slice thickness), which preclude the creation of anatomically meaningful
3D cardiac shapes. The proposed pipeline is fully automated, due to network's
ability to infer landmarks, which are then used downstream in the pipeline to
initialise atlas propagation. We validate the pipeline on 1831 healthy subjects
and 649 subjects with pulmonary hypertension. Extensive numerical experiments
on the two datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is robust and capable
of producing accurate, high-resolution and anatomically smooth bi-ventricular
3D models, despite the artefacts in input CMR volumes
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