2011 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro

The problem of reconstruction of ultrasound images by means of blind deconvolution has long been recognized as one of the central problems in medical ultrasound imaging. In this paper, a hybrid deconvolution method is employed to recover a reliable estimate of the tissue reflectivity function directly from ultrasound RF data. Here, the “hybridization” suggests a two-stage reconstruction scheme, in... View full abstract»

A fetal ultrasound (US) biometry plane can be identified from the presence and absence of landmarks in the image. We propose an automated method of detecting two important anatomical landmarks (stomach bubble and umbilical vein) from the fetal ultrasound abdomen scan for the purpose of scoring the image quality. The implementation is based on the AdaBoost learning algorithm with an execution time ... View full abstract»

Although feature selection has been proven to be very effective in machine learning and pattern classification applications, it has not been widely practiced in the area of image annotation and retrieval. This paper presents a method of selecting a near optimal to optimal subset of statistical texture descriptors in efficient representation and retrieval of ultrasound medical images. An objective ... View full abstract»

The simulation of the hepatocellular carcinoma therapy effects is often used for the intervention planning. As the physical-based model of the simulation is very time-consuming, the speed of this method becomes an obstacle during the clinical application simulation. In order to accelerate the simulation, a GPU-based (Graphic Processing Unit) acceleration method of the pressure field estimation is ... View full abstract»

This paper presents a method of improving 3D ultrasound image resolution by fusing the 3D ultrasound images with 3D optical imagery obtained from a limited field of view. Organ surfaces are reconstructed using fine samples from the optical image of a single side of the organ and coarse samples from ultrasound image of the hidden side. The reconstruction is based on the fact that all deformations o... View full abstract»

This paper presents a recursive ultrasonic tomographic imaging method using the propagation and back propagation for solving a Helmholtz equation with a fixed frequency. The proposed algorithm recursively processes data collected on the eight boundaries of an octagon in a circular mode. Using numerical examples, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm results in high quality images with fast co... View full abstract»

Recently, polymer-shelled microbubbles have been proposed, showing some important advantages. They offer both a mechanical stability and a distinctive feature to be easily targeted to a specific address within the body. This paper focuses on the opportunity of use polymeric microbubbles as contrast agent in medical imaging applications, where the nonlinear response is exploited and the destruction... View full abstract»

In this paper we present a feature descriptor, based on a Markov random field (MRF) texture model, for radio-frequency (RF) ultrasound data. The proposed approach combines global data statistics in terms of a maximum-likelihood-estimated (MLE) distribution with local pattern characteristics employing MRF interaction parameters. This combining approach facilitates the encoding of the underlying nat... View full abstract»

In this paper, we described and validated a semi-automated algorithm based on the level set method to segment the media-adventitia boundary (MAB) and lumen-intima boundary (LIB) of the carotid arteries from 3D ultrasound (3DUS) images to support the computation of carotid vessel wall volume (VWV). We incorporated local region-based and edge-based energies for the MAB segmentation, and both local a... View full abstract»

Diagnosis of white matter damage by neonatal cranial ultrasound (CrUS) is subject to inter-observer variability and has a low sensitivity to detect late abnormal neurodevelopment in life. In the last decades there have been a significant effort reporting that statistical features of ultrasound images carry important information associated with changes of tissue microstructure. In this work we expl... View full abstract»

Computation of the spatial impulse response (SIR) is a time-consuming but fundamental step in the computation of the linear ultrasonic fields in homogeneous media and the scattering fields in the presence of non-homogeneity. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for the computation of the SIR which is suitable for parallelization on massively multiprocessing platforms. The algorithm is numeric... View full abstract»

Self-calibrating k-space-based image reconstruction in parallel MRI interpolates the subsampled multi-channel data to a fully sampled Nyquist grid in k-space. Adopting a filter bank interpolation framework, we provide a new formulation of the associated inverse problem and develop the theory for blind identification of the interpolant filters. The developed method is applied to imaging scenarios w... View full abstract»

Real-time cardiovascular MRI is a useful and challenging dynamic imaging application. The partial separability (PS) model enables reconstruction of dynamic cardiac images from highly undersampled (k, t)-space data. However, the underlying PS model-based reconstruction problem is ill-conditioned, so regularization is often necessary to stabilize its solution. It has been shown that ℓ1reg... View full abstract»

Compressed sensing reconstruction algorithms exploit the sparsity of MRI images to significantly undersample the k-space. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive, may be slow to converge, and perform best when the samples are randomly selected. We propose a new sparse reconstruction algorithm based on the annihilating filter method to palliate these issues. This new method is non i... View full abstract»

We introduce a novel unifying approach to jointly estimate the motion and the dynamic images in first pass cardiac perfusion MR imaging. We formulate the recovery as an energy minimization scheme using a unified objective function that combines data consistency, spatial smoothness, motion and contrast dynamics penalties. We introduce a variable splitting strategy to simplify the objective function... View full abstract»

Much progress has been made in the design of efficient acquisition trajectories for high spatial and temporal resolution in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Additionally, significant developments in image reconstruction have enabled the reconstruction of reasonable images from massively undersampled or noisy data that is corrupted by a variety of physical effects, including magnetic field inhomog... View full abstract»

Using a reference image (or a template) to constrain image reconstruction from limited data is becoming more and more popular in various imaging applications. However, in order for a reference/template to be a useful constraint, it has to be correctly aligned with the target image to be determined. This paper addresses this new image registration problem of registering a high-resolution image to a... View full abstract»