IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging

In computed tomography, there is a trade-off between the quality of the reconstructed image and the radiation dose received by the patient. In order to find an appropriate compromise between the image quality of the reconstructed images and the radiation dose, it is important to have reliable methods for evaluating the quality of the reconstructed images. A successful family of methods for the ass... View full abstract»

In magnetomotive ultrasound (MMUS) imaging, an oscillating external magnetic field displaces tissue loaded with super-paramagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) particles. The induced motion is on the nanometer scale, which makes its detection and its isolation from background motion challenging. Previously, a frequency and phase locking (FPL) algorithm was used to suppress background motion by subtracting ma... View full abstract»

Prior-image-based reconstruction (PIBR) methods have demonstrated great potential for radiation dose reduction in computed tomography (CT) applications. PIBR methods take ad-vantage of shared anatomical information between sequential scans by incorporating a patient-specific prior image into the re-construction objective function, often as a form of regularization. However, one major challenge wit... View full abstract»

The existence of diverse image datasets accompanied by reference annotations is a crucial prerequisite for an objective benchmarking of bioimage analysis methods. Nevertheless, such a prerequisite is arduous to satisfy for time-lapse, multidimensional fluorescence microscopy image data, manual annotations of which are laborious and often impracticable. In this paper, we present a simulation system... View full abstract»

THistopathological analysis is the current gold standard in breast cancer diagnosis and management, however, as imaging technology improves, the amount of potential diagnostic information that may be demonstrable radiologically should also increase. We aimed to evaluate the potential clinical usefulness of 3D phase-contrast micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) imaging at high spatial resolutions a... View full abstract»

Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) is the standard exam for osteoporosis diagnosis and fracture risk evaluation at the spine. However, numerous patients with bone fragility are not diagnosed as such. In fact, standard analysis of DXA images does not differentiate between trabecular and cortical bone; neither specifically assess of the bone density in the vertebral body, which is where most of ... View full abstract»

Liver cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death. To assist doctors in hepatocellular carcinoma diagnosis and treatment planning, an accurate and automatic liver and tumor segmentation method is highly demanded in the clinical practice. Recently, fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), including 2D and 3D FCNs, serve as the back-bone in many volumetric image segmentation. However, 2D ... View full abstract»

MRI using nuclei other than protons is of clinical interest due to the important role of these nuclei in cellular processes. Phosphorous-31 (31P), for example, plays an important role in energy metabolism. However measurement of 31P can be challenging, as the receive signal is weak compared to that of proton (1H). Consequently, it is often necessary to integrate 1H elements for localisations and B... View full abstract»

In vivo characterization of intracardiac blood velocity vector fields may provide new clinical information, but is currently not available for bedside evaluation. In this work, 4D vector flow imaging for intracardiac flow assessment is demonstrated using a clinical ultrasound (US) system and a matrix array transducer, without the use of contrast agent. Two acquisition schemes were developed, one f... View full abstract»

We present a method of generating spatial maps of kinetic parameters from dynamic sequences of images collected in hyperpolarized carbon-13 MRI experiments. The technique exploits spatial correlations in the dynamic traces via regularization in the space of parameter maps. Similar techniques have proven successful in other dynamic imaging problems such as dynamic contrast enhanced MRI. In this pap... View full abstract»

In quantitative magnetic resonance T1 mapping, the Variable Flip Angle (VFA) steady state spoiled gradient recalled echo (SPGR) imaging technique is popular as it provides a series of high resolution T1 weighted images in a clinically feasible time. Fast, linear methods that estimate T1 maps from these weighted images have been proposed, such as DESPOT1 and iterative reweighted linear least square... View full abstract»

Despite being the solid tumor with the highest incidence in western men, prostate cancer (PCa) still lacks reliable imaging solutions that can overcome the need for systematic biopsies. Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Imaging (DCEUS) allows us to quantitatively characterize the vascular bed in the prostate, due to its ability to visualize an intravenously administered bolus of contrast agents... View full abstract»

To realize the full potential of deep learning for medical imaging, large annotated datasets are required for training. Such datasets are difficult to acquire due to privacy issues, lack of experts available for annotation, underrepresentation of rare conditions and poor standardization. The lack of annotated data has been addressed in conventional vision applications using synthetic images refine... View full abstract»

Corneal endothelium images obtained by in vivo specular microscopy provide important information to assess the health status of the cornea. Estimation of clinical parameters, such as cell density, polymegethism, and pleomorphism, requires accurate cell segmentation. State-of-the-art techniques to automatically segment the endothelium are error-prone when applied to images with low contrast and/or ... View full abstract»

Over the years, medical image tracking has gained considerable attention from both medical and research communities due to its widespread utility in a multitude of clinical applications, from functional assessment during diagnosis and therapy planning to structure tracking or image fusion during image-guided interventions. Despite the ever-increasing number of image tracking methods available, mos... View full abstract»

By resolving the energy of the incident X-ray photons, spectral X-ray imaging with photon counting detectors offers additional material-specific information compared to conventional X-ray imaging. This additional information can be used to improve clinical diagnosis for various applications. However, spectral imaging still faces several challenges. Amplified noise and a reduced signal-to-noise rat... View full abstract»

Measuring cell motility and morphology is important for revealing their functional characteristics. This paper presents automation techniques that enable automated, noninvasive measurement of motility and morphology parameters of single sperms. Compared to the status quo of qualitative estimation of single sperm’s motility and morphology manually, the automation techniques provide quantitat... View full abstract»

The polychromatic X-ray spectrum and the energydependent attenuation coefficient of materials cause beam hardening artifacts in CT reconstructed volumes. These artifacts appear as cupping and streak artifacts depending on the material composition and the geometry of the imaged object. CT scanners employ projection linearization to transform polychromatic attenuation to monochromatic attenuation us... View full abstract»

Tracing tubular structures from biomedical images is important for a wide range of applications. Particularly, the spermatozoon is an essential cell whose flagella has a tubular form. Its main function is to fertilize the egg and the flagellum is fundamental to achieve this task which depends importantly on the dynamics of intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i). Measuring [Ca2... View full abstract»

Due to a lack of fetal imaging coils, the standard commercial abdominal coil is often used for fetal imaging, the performance of which is limited by its insufficient coverage, element number and SNR. In this work, a dedicated 36-channel coil array, of which size can best fit the body sizes of pregnancy gestation from 20 to 37+ weeks, was designed for fetal imaging at 3T. Signal-to-noise rat... View full abstract»

Retinal fundus photographs have been used in the diagnosis of many ocular diseases such as glaucoma, pathological myopia, age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. With the development of computer science, computer aided diagnosis has been developed to process and analyse the retinal images automatically. One of the challenges in the analysis is that the quality of the retinal ima... View full abstract»

Contrast source inversion – electrical properties tomography (CSI-EPT) is an iterative reconstruction method to retrieve the electrical properties (EPs) of tissues from MR data. The method is based on integral representations of the electromagnetic (EM) field and has been shown to allow EP reconstructions of small structures as well as tissue boundaries with compelling accuracy. However, to... View full abstract»

Delineation of the left ventricular cavity, myocardium and right ventricle from cardiac magnetic resonance images (multi-slice 2D cine MRI) is a common clinical task to establish diagnosis. The automation of the corresponding tasks has thus been the subject of intense research over the past decades. In this paper, we introduce the “Automatic Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge” dataset (ACDC... View full abstract»

A novel approach to tomographic data processing has been developed and evaluated using the Jagiellonian PET (J-PET) scanner as an example. We propose a system in which there is no need for powerful, local to the scanner processing facility, capable to reconstruct images on the fly. Instead we introduce a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) System-on-Chip (SoC) platform connected directly to data ... View full abstract»