Search results for "MRI"

PVA gel dosimeters for radiotherapy applications,

2015

Gel dosimeters for three-dimensional mapping of radiotherapy doses were introduced at Yale University in the mid-1980’s. Soon after, research and development in this field also started in Italy. Early work was done at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, and at the Universities of Pisa and Milan. Several institutes now collaborate on this topic with the goal of developing new formulations of hydrogel matrices with improved characteristics of stability, sensitivity and spatial resolution compared to those of earlier Fricke-gel and polymer-gel systems. Contrary to earlier gels based on natural gelling agents, such as porcine skin gelatin and/or agarose, which suffer from limited batch -to-batch …

Investigation of relaxation times of irradiated Fricke gels by means of nuclear magnetic resonance relaxometry

2016

Fricke gel dosimeters are ideal candidates to provide 3D maps of dose distributions and are particularly useful in the plann ing and verification phase of radiotherapy treatments. One of the most effective experimental techniques to reconstruct dose maps is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This measures th e nuclear relaxation times variations induced by irradiation. In this work, we analyzed Fricke gels with and without Xylenol Orange by means of a single side-NMR relaxometer (which is abl e to provide information on both relaxation relaxation times T1 and T2 and is mainly used in the field of diagnostics for Cultural Heritage [1-2] to perform porosimetry meaurements). Our goal was to per…

Fabrication and characterization of micrometer-scale ZnO memristors

2015

Memristors are an interesting class of resistive random access memory (RRAM) based on the electrical switching of metal oxide film resistivity . They are characterized for exhibiting resistive switching between a high-resistance state (HRS) and a low-resistance state (LRS) and have been recently considered as one of the most promising candidates for next-generation nonvolatile memory devices because of their low power consumption, fast switching operation, nondestructive readout, and remarkable scalability. The device structure is simply an oxide layer sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The switching behaviour is dependent both on the oxide material and the choice of metal electrodes.…

Resistive switching of anodic TiO2-based Memristors

2018

In recent years, memristors have attracted great attention owing to their simple fabrication process, high scalability, good compatibility with the CMOS technology, high switching speed, low power consumption and low cost for next-generation non-volatile memory technology [1]. The basic cell structure of a memristor is an insulator sandwiched between two metal electrodes. Among the materials being studied for memristors fabrication, binary metal oxides, such as TiO2, are most favourable because of their simple constituents, compatible with CMOS processes, and resistive to thermal/chemical damages. Anodizing is a an electrochemical low cost process carried out at room temperature to grow oxi…

Pulsed laser deposition of ZnO and VO2 films for memristor fabrication

2015

Memristors are resistive switching memory devices which have attracted much attention over the last years for high-density memory applications because of their simple structure, small cell size, high speed, low power consumption, potential for 3-D stacking and excellent compatibility with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology [1]. Beside nonvolatile memory applications, memristors have been also proposed for other different applications including biosensors [2] and neuromorphic [3] circuits. The device structure is simply an oxide material sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The switching behavior is not only dependent on the oxide material but also on the choic…

Metodi Automatici per la Compensazione della Distorsione in Immagini di Risonanza Magnetica

A Gabor-based Technique for Bias Removal in MR images

2007

Magnetic Resonance images are often characterized by irregularly displaced luminance fluctuations that are called bias artifact. This disturb is due to a drop in signal intensity caused by the distance between imaged sample and receiver coil. An original approach to bias removal in Magnetic Resonance images is presented, which is based on the use of Gabor filter to extract the artifact. The proposed technique restores the image using a correction model, which is derived from the attenuation of signal diffusion across the tissues. No hypotheses are made about the structure of the tissues under investigation and the used MR spectrum. The approach is presented in detail, and extensive experime…

A Novel Expert System for Non-Invasive Liver Iron Overload Estimation in Thalassemic Patients

2014

Expert Systems can integrate logic based often on computational intelligence methods and they are used in complex problem solving. In this work an Expert System for classifying liver iron concentration in thalassemic patients is presented. In this work, an ANN is used to validate the output of the L.I.O.MO.T (Liver Iron Overload Monitoring in Thalassemia) method against the output of the state-of-the-art method based on MRI T2 assessment for liver iron concentration. The model has been validated with a dataset of 200 samples. The experimental Mean Squared Error results and Correlation show interesting performances. The proposed algorithm has been developed as a plug in for OsiriX Dicom View…

Noise Filtering Using Edge-Driven Adaptive Anisotropic Diffusion

2008

This paper presents a method aimed to noise removal in MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). We propose an improvement of Perona and Malik's anisotropic diffusion filter. In our schema, the diffusion equation of the filter has been modified to take into account the edges direction, This allows the filter to blur uniform areas, while it better preserves the edges. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation is presented and the results are compared with other methods.

Morphological exponential entropy driven-HUM.

2006

This paper presents an improvement to the Ex- ponential Entropy Driven - Homomorphic Unsharp Masking (E 2 D − HUM ) algorithm devoted to illumination artifact sup- pression on Magnetic Resonance Images. E 2 D−HUM requires a segmentation step to remove dark regions in the foreground whose intensity is comparable with background, because strong edges produce streak artifacts on the tissues. This new version of the algorithm keeps the same good properties of E 2 D − HUM without a segmentation phase, whose parameters should be chosen in relation to the image. I. INTRODUCTION Most of the studies on illumination correction found in literature are oriented to brain (18) magnetic resonance images (…