Wie ist Transdisziplinarität möglich?

Transdisziplinäre Nachhaltigkeitsforschung benötigt geeignete konzeptionelle Grundlagen. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt zwei mögliche Ansätze vor und diskutiert, inwieweit sie als Grundlage für weitere Forschungen geeignet sind

Дискретно-континуальные системы: подходы, модели, программно-модельные комплексы

<div><p>Background</p><p>Diaphragm weakness is the main reason for respiratory dysfunction in patients with Pompe disease, a progressive metabolic myopathy affecting respiratory and limb-girdle muscles. Since respiratory failure is the major cause of death among adult patients, early identification of respiratory muscle involvement is necessary to initiate treatment in time and possibly prevent irreversible damage. In this paper we investigate the suitability of dynamic MR imaging in combination with state-of-the-art image analysis methods to assess respiratory muscle weakness.</p><p>Methods</p><p>The proposed methodology relies on image registration and lung surface extraction to quantify lung kinematics during breathing. This allows for the extraction of geometry and motion features of the lung that characterize the independent contribution of the diaphragm and the thoracic muscles to the respiratory cycle.</p><p>Results</p><p>Results in 16 3D+t MRI scans (10 Pompe patients and 6 controls) of a slow expiratory maneuver show that kinematic analysis from dynamic 3D images reveals important additional information about diaphragm mechanics and respiratory muscle involvement when compared to conventional pulmonary function tests. Pompe patients with severely reduced pulmonary function showed severe diaphragm weakness presented by minimal motion of the diaphragm. In patients with moderately reduced pulmonary function, cranial displacement of posterior diaphragm parts was reduced and the diaphragm dome was oriented more horizontally at full inspiration compared to healthy controls.</p><p>Conclusion</p><p>Dynamic 3D MRI provides data for analyzing the contribution of both diaphragm and thoracic muscles independently. The proposed image analysis method has the potential to detect less severe diaphragm weakness and could thus be used to determine the optimal start of treatment in adult patients with Pompe disease in prospect of increased treatment response.</p></div

Background and Purpose Methods: Vessel Segmentation Methods: Optic Nerve Head Localization Experiments and Results

Segmentation and localization of retinal structures Our vessel segmentation[2] is a multiscale method us-The optic nerve head is localized by a modified FRST. Each method was tested on 45 images (resolution: is an essential pre-processing step for many applica-ing the vesselness feature (see Fig. 2): Our modifications[3] are the following: 3504 × 2336 pixels) of the public available high res-tions of fully automatic or computer aided medical diagnosis. In this work, we propose a framework for localizing and segmenting the most important retinal structures in color fundus images: • vascular tree • optic nerve head 1. Histogram stretching and denoising using bilateral filter 2. Iterative down sampling: •Highest resolution is the input resolution •Further lower resolution images are obtained by rescaling the last image with a factor 0.5 3. Vesselness extraction in each image 1.Denoising and elimination of small vessels from the image using median filtering 2.Upper-bound constraint introduced to the gradient in the accumulator map to neglect edges of vessels 3.Global maximum selection over all maxima at each map to estimate ONH diameter olution fundus (HRF) database (www5.informatik.unierlangen.de/research/data/fundus-images/), and the results are compared to a manually generated gold standard: 1.Vessel segmentation accuracy

Quantification of Diaphragm Mechanics in Pompe Disease Using Dynamic 3D MRI.

BACKGROUND: Diaphragm weakness is the main reason for respiratory dysfunction in patients with Pompe disease, a progressive metabolic myopathy affecting respiratory and limb-girdle muscles. Since respiratory failure is the major cause of death among adult patients, early identification of respiratory muscle involvement is necessary to initiate treatment in time and possibly prevent irreversible damage. In this paper we investigate the suitability of dynamic MR imaging in combination with state-of-the-art image analysis methods to assess respiratory muscle weakness. METHODS: The proposed methodology relies on image registration and lung surface extraction to quantify lung kinematics during breathing. This allows for the extraction of geometry and motion features of the lung that characterize the independent contribution of the diaphragm and the thoracic muscles to the respiratory cycle. RESULTS: Results in 16 3D+t MRI scans (10 Pompe patients and 6 controls) of a slow expiratory maneuver show that kinematic analysis from dynamic 3D images reveals important additional information about diaphragm mechanics and respiratory muscle involvement when compared to conventional pulmonary function tests. Pompe patients with severely reduced pulmonary function showed severe diaphragm weakness presented by minimal motion of the diaphragm. In patients with moderately reduced pulmonary function, cranial displacement of posterior diaphragm parts was reduced and the diaphragm dome was oriented more horizontally at full inspiration compared to healthy controls. CONCLUSION: Dynamic 3D MRI provides data for analyzing the contribution of both diaphragm and thoracic muscles independently. The proposed image analysis method has the potential to detect less severe diaphragm weakness and could thus be used to determine the optimal start of treatment in adult patients with Pompe disease in prospect of increased treatment response

Quantification of Diaphragm Mechanics in Pompe Disease Using Dynamic 3D MRI

Background Diaphragm weakness is the main reason for respiratory dysfunction in patients with Pompe disease, a progressive metabolic myopathy affecting respiratory and limb-girdle muscles. Since respiratory failure is the major cause of death among adult patients, early identification of respiratory muscle involvement is necessary to initiate treatment in time and possibly prevent irreversible damage. In this paper we investigate the suitability of dynamic MR imaging in combination with state-of-the-art image analysis methods to assess respiratory muscle weakness. Methods The proposed methodology relies on image registration and lung surface extraction to quantify lung kinematics during breathing. This allows for the extraction of geometry and motion features of the lung that characterize the independent contribution of the diaphragm and the thoracic muscles to the respiratory cycle. Results Results in 16 3D+t MRI scans (10 Pompe patients and 6 controls) of a slow expiratory maneuver show that kinematic analysis from dynamic 3D images reveals important additional information about diaphragm mechanics and respiratory muscle involvement when compared to conventional pulmonary function tests. Pompe patients with severely reduced pulmonary function showed severe diaphragm weakness presented by minimal motion of the diaphragm. In patients with moderately reduced pulmonary function, cranial displacement of posterior diaphragm parts was reduced and the diaphragm dome was oriented more horizontally at full inspiration compared to healthy controls. Conclusion Dynamic 3D MRI provides data for analyzing the contribution of both diaphragm and thoracic muscles independently. The proposed image analysis method has the potential to detect less severe diaphragm weakness and could thus be used to determine the optimal start of treatment in adult patients with Pompe disease in prospect of increased treatment response

Mesh representation of 3D lung segmentation.

<p>A 3D mesh of the lungs is presented in the left image. The surface is colored to distinguish between the different surface segments. On the right, the same mesh is shown after unfolding the individual surface segments into a plane. The orientation labels indicate the viewing direction.</p

Chest wall and diaphragm contribution to overall lung volume change.

<p>The bar plot shows the amount of volume displaced by the costal surface (upper bars) and diaphragm surface (lower bars) for all subjects. Patients (<i>P01</i>—<i>P10</i>) and controls (<i>C01</i>—<i>C06</i>) are sorted within their group in descending order with respect to supine FVC (% of predicted).</p

Overview of the lung surface partitioning procedure.

<p>The diagram shows the individual steps to subdivide the surface mesh of a binary lung segmentation into six parts. In the two main parts the costal surface is extracted and the residual surface is divided into diaphragmatic and medial surface.</p