126,242 research outputs found
Volumetric analysis of arteriovenous malformation using computed tomographic angiography
Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityAn arteriovenous malformation (AVM) is an abnormal collection of blood vessels in which arterial blood flows directly into the draining vein without the normal interposed capillaries. It is an important and growing public healthcare problem affecting millions of Americans and many more people internationally. There are several potential treatment options for the AVM, and the best treatment depends on the maximum length of nidus based on the Spetzler- Martin grading system. However, this grading system is insensitive to volume, because it was designed on the basis of two dimensional digital subtraction
angiography images. Here, we report a method using computed tomographic angiography to measure the volume of AVM nidus, as a means for noninvasively assessment. The initial results show statistically significant differences between healthy and AVM subject groups in the direct comparisons of the volume (cm3) through the method we suggested (2.456 ± 1.482, 12.478 ± 5.743 and 53.963 ± 9.338 (mean ± stdev.); Normal (No AVM), Small (< 3cm), Medium (3 ~ 6 cm) respectively; P < 0.005 for all), and they also show the exponential correlation between the AVM volume and the maximum length of a nidus (trend-line: y = 4.4183e0.536x with R2 = 0.945). These results provide more accurate volumetric information. Therefore, this noninvasive imaging-based method is a promising means to measure the volume of AVM using clinically available imaging tools
An Improved Approach for Contrast Enhancement of Spinal Cord Images based on Multiscale Retinex Algorithm
This paper presents a new approach for contrast enhancement of spinal cord
medical images based on multirate scheme incorporated into multiscale retinex
algorithm. The proposed work here uses HSV color space, since HSV color space
separates color details from intensity. The enhancement of medical image is
achieved by down sampling the original image into five versions, namely, tiny,
small, medium, fine, and normal scale. This is due to the fact that the each
versions of the image when independently enhanced and reconstructed results in
enormous improvement in the visual quality. Further, the contrast stretching
and MultiScale Retinex (MSR) techniques are exploited in order to enhance each
of the scaled version of the image. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by
combining each of these scales in an efficient way to obtain the composite
enhanced image. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is validated by using
a wavelet energy metric in the wavelet domain. Reconstructed image using
proposed method highlights the details (edges and tissues), reduces image noise
(Gaussian and Speckle) and improves the overall contrast. The proposed
algorithm also enhances sharp edges of the tissue surrounding the spinal cord
regions which is useful for diagnosis of spinal cord lesions. Elaborated
experiments are conducted on several medical images and results presented show
that the enhanced medical pictures are of good quality and is found to be
better compared with other researcher methods.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, International Journal of Imaging and Robotics.
arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.571
Atomic discreteness and the nature of structural equilibrium in conductance histograms of electromigrated Cu-nanocontacts
We investigate the histograms of conductance values obtained during
controlled electromigration thinning of Cu thin films. We focus on the question
whether the most frequently observed conductance values, apparent as peaks in
conductance histograms, can be attributed to the atomic structure of the wire.
To this end we calculate the Fourier transform of the conductance histograms.
We find all the frequencies matching the highly symmetric crystallographic
directions of fcc-Cu. In addition, there are other frequencies explainable by
oxidation and possibly formation of hcp-Cu. With these structures we can
explain all peaks occurring in the Fourier transform within the relevant range.
The results remain the same if only a third of the samples are included. By
comparing our results to the ones available in the literature on work-hardened
nanowires we find indications that even at low temperatures of the environment,
metallic nanocontacts could show enhanced electromigration at low current
densities due to defects enhancing electron scattering
Acceleration of Histogram-Based Contrast Enhancement via Selective Downsampling
In this paper, we propose a general framework to accelerate the universal
histogram-based image contrast enhancement (CE) algorithms. Both spatial and
gray-level selective down- sampling of digital images are adopted to decrease
computational cost, while the visual quality of enhanced images is still
preserved and without apparent degradation. Mapping function calibration is
novelly proposed to reconstruct the pixel mapping on the gray levels missed by
downsampling. As two case studies, accelerations of histogram equalization (HE)
and the state-of-the-art global CE algorithm, i.e., spatial mutual information
and PageRank (SMIRANK), are presented detailedly. Both quantitative and
qualitative assessment results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed
CE acceleration framework. In typical tests, computational efficiencies of HE
and SMIRANK have been speeded up by about 3.9 and 13.5 times, respectively.Comment: accepted by IET Image Processin
Contrast Enhancement of Brightness-Distorted Images by Improved Adaptive Gamma Correction
As an efficient image contrast enhancement (CE) tool, adaptive gamma
correction (AGC) was previously proposed by relating gamma parameter with
cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the pixel gray levels within an
image. ACG deals well with most dimmed images, but fails for globally bright
images and the dimmed images with local bright regions. Such two categories of
brightness-distorted images are universal in real scenarios, such as improper
exposure and white object regions. In order to attenuate such deficiencies,
here we propose an improved AGC algorithm. The novel strategy of negative
images is used to realize CE of the bright images, and the gamma correction
modulated by truncated CDF is employed to enhance the dimmed ones. As such,
local over-enhancement and structure distortion can be alleviated. Both
qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that our proposed method
yields consistently good CE results
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