0000000000395743
AUTHOR
Silvia Ruiz-espana
Automatic segmentation of the spine by means of a probabilistic atlas with a special focus on ribs suppression. Preliminary results
Spine is a structure commonly involved in several prevalent diseases. In clinical diagnosis, therapy, and surgical intervention, the identification and segmentation of the vertebral bodies are crucial steps. However, automatic and detailed segmentation of vertebrae is a challenging task, especially due to the proximity of the vertebrae to the corresponding ribs and other structures such as blood vessels. In this study, to overcome these problems, a probabilistic atlas of the spine, including cervical, thoracic and lumbar vertebrae has been built to introduce anatomical knowledge in the segmentation process, aiming to deal with overlapping gray levels and the proximity to other structures. F…
Comparative Analysis of Tagging and Feature-Tracking Cardiac MRI Techniques for the Evaluation of Cardiac Deformation
[EN] Currently, there is a high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, being the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Thus, a rapid and effective evaluation of the heart is increasingly relevant to diagnose the patient early and achieve appropriate treatment. For this reason, this study aims to compare myocardial deformation parameters such as circumferential strain (segmental, base, mid, apical and global) and global torsion values by the CMR tissue tagging reference technique in SPAMM cine images and the promising feature-tracking technique in b-SSFP cine images, in 31 healthy subjects and 35 patients diagnosed with infarct. The results obtained showed that there is a high agreement in t…
Magnetic Resonance MicroImaging of a Swine Infarcted Heart: Performing Cardiac Virtual Histologies
The aim of this study is to develop a computer-aided intuitive software tool based on MATLAB to reproduce the functions of a virtual histology over Magnetic Resonance (MR) microimages of small samples of swine's infarcted hearts. The basic characterization consists of selecting regions of interest (ROIs) of that MR microimage and extracting the most important information of these regions. The software tool will implement intuitive and sophisticated tools that allow the user to define ROIs on the different types of images provided by the MR scanner. The final purpose of this tool will be to analyze the acquired data in order to characterize some aspects of the later possible events after a m…
PSPU-Net for Automatic Short Axis Cine MRI Segmentation of Left and Right Ventricles
[EN] Characterization of the heart anatomy and function is mostly done with magnetic resonance image cine series. To achieve a correct characterization, the volume of the right and left ventricle need to be segmented, which is a timeconsuming task. We propose a new convolutional neural network architecture that combines U-net with PSP modules (PSPU-net) for the segmentation of left and right ventricle cavities and left ventricle myocardium in the diastolic frame of short-axis cine MRI images and compare its results against a classic 3D U-net architecture. We used a dataset containing 399 cases in total. The results showed higher quality results in both segmentation and final volume estimati…
Automatic segmentation of the spine by means of a probabilistic atlas with a special focus on ribs suppression
[EN] Purpose: The development of automatic and reliable algorithms for the detection and segmentation of the vertebrae are of great importance prior to any diagnostic task. However, an important problem found to accurately segment the vertebrae is the presence of the ribs in the thoracic region. To overcome this problem, a probabilistic atlas of the spine has been developed dealing with the proximity of other structures, with a special focus on ribs suppression. Methods: The data sets used consist of Computed Tomography images corresponding to 21 patients suffering from spinal metastases. Two methods have been combined to obtain the final result: firstly, an initial segmentation is performe…
Means of 2D and 3D Shapes and Their Application in Anatomical Atlas Building
This works deals with the concept of mean when applied to 2D or 3D shapes and with its applicability to the construction of digital atlases to be used in digital anatomy. Unlike numerical data, there are several possible definitions of the mean of a shape distribution and procedures for its estimation from a sample of shapes. Most popular definitions are based in the distance function or in the coverage function, each with its strengths and limitations. Closely related to the concept of mean shape is the concept of atlas, here understood as a probability or membership map that tells how likely is that a point belongs to a shape drawn from the shape distribution at hand. We devise a procedur…