Biomechanics-informed Neural Networks for Myocardial Motion Tracking in MRI

Image registration is an ill-posed inverse problem which often requires regularisation on the solution space. In contrast to most of the current approaches which impose explicit regularisation terms such as smoothness, in this paper we propose a novel method that can implicitly learn biomechanics-informed regularisation. Such an approach can incorporate application-specific prior knowledge into deep learning based registration. Particularly, the proposed biomechanics-informed regularisation leverages a variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn a manifold for biomechanically plausible deformations and to implicitly capture their underlying properties via reconstructing biomechanical simulations. The learnt VAE regulariser then can be coupled with any deep learning based registration network to regularise the solution space to be biomechanically plausible. The proposed method is validated in the context of myocardial motion tracking on 2D stacks of cardiac MRI data from two different datasets. The results show that it can achieve better performance against other competing methods in terms of motion tracking accuracy and has the ability to learn biomechanical properties such as incompressibility and strains. The method has also been shown to have better generalisability to unseen domains compared with commonly used L2 regularisation schemes.Comment: The paper is early accepted by MICCAI 202

Mixture of piperazine and potassium carbonate to absorb CO<inf>2</inf> in the packed column: Modelling study

Supplementary data are available online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016236121019098?via%3Dihub#s0135 .A rate-based non-equilibrium model is developed for CO2 absorption with the mixture of piperazine and potassium carbonate solution. The model is based on the mass and heat transfer between the liquid and the gas phases on each packed column segment. The thermodynamic equilibrium assumption (physical equilibrium) is considered only at the gas–liquid interface and chemical equilibrium is assumed in the liquid phase bulk. The calculated mass transfer coefficient from available correlations is corrected by the enhancement factor to account for the chemical reactions in the system. The Extended-UNIQUAC model is used to calculate the non-idealities related to the liquid phase, and the Soave-Redlich-Kwong (SRK) equation of state is used for the gas phase calculations. The thermodynamic analysis is also performed in this study. The enhancement factor is used to represent the effect of chemical reactions of the piperazine promoted potassium carbonate solution, which has not been considered given the rigorous electrolyte thermodynamics in the absorber. The developed model showed good agreement with the experimental data and similar studies in the literature

GPU accelerated registration of a statistical shape model of the lumbar spine to 3D ultrasound images.

We present a parallel implementation of a statistical shape model registration to 3D ultrasound images of the lumbar vertebrae (L2-L4). Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy optimization technique, along with Linear Correlation of Linear Combination similarity metric have been used, to improve the robustness and capture range of the registration approach. Instantiation and ultrasound simulation have been implemented on a graphics processing unit for a faster registration. Phantom studies show a mean target registration error of 3.2 mm, while 80% of all the cases yield target registration error of below 3.5 mm. Copyright 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modification of the content of the paper are prohibited.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofReviewedFacult

Articulated Statistical Shape Model-Based 2D-3D Reconstruction of a Hip Joint

In this paper, reconstruction of three-dimensional (3D) patient-specific models of a hip joint from two-dimensional (2D) calibrated X-ray images is addressed. Existing 2D-3D reconstruction techniques usually reconstruct a patient-specific model of a single anatomical structure without considering the relationship to its neighboring structures. Thus, when those techniques would be applied to reconstruction of patient-specific models of a hip joint, the reconstructed models may penetrate each other due to narrowness of the hip joint space and hence do not represent a true hip joint of the patient. To address this problem we propose a novel 2D-3D reconstruction framework using an articulated statistical shape model (aSSM). Different from previous work on constructing an aSSM, where the joint posture is modeled as articulation in a training set via statistical analysis, here it is modeled as a parametrized rotation of the femur around the joint center. The exact rotation of the hip joint as well as the patient-specific models of the joint structures, i.e., the proximal femur and the pelvis, are then estimated by optimally fitting the aSSM to a limited number of calibrated X-ray images. Taking models segmented from CT data as the ground truth, we conducted validation experiments on both plastic and cadaveric bones. Qualitatively, the experimental results demonstrated that the proposed 2D-3D reconstruction framework preserved the hip joint structure and no model penetration was found. Quantitatively, average reconstruction errors of 1.9 mm and 1.1 mm were found for the pelvis and the proximal femur, respectively