Genome-wide resequencing of KRICE_CORE reveals their potential for future breeding, as well as functional and evolutionary studies in the post-genomic era.

Background: Rice germplasm collections continue to grow in number and size around the world. Since maintaining and screening such massive resources remains challenging, it is important to establish practical methods to manage them. A core collection, by definition, refers to a subset of the entire population that preserves the majority of genetic diversity, enhancing the efficiency of germplasm utilization.

Ultrasound guidance for beating heart mitral valve repair augmented by synthetic dynamic CT.

Minimally invasive valvular intervention commonly requires intra-procedural navigation to provide spatial and temporal information of relevant cardiac structures and device components. Recently intra-procedural trans-esophageal echocardiography (TEE) has been exploited for this purpose due to its accessibility, low cost, ease of use, and real-time imaging capacity. However, the position and orientation of tissue targets relative to surgical tools can be challenging to perceive, particularly using 2D imaging planes.

A mitral annulus tracking approach for navigation of off-pump beating heart mitral valve repair.

Purpose: To develop and validate a real-time mitral valve annulus (MVA) tracking approach based on biplane transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE) data and magnetic tracking systems (MTS) to be used in minimally invasive off-pump beating heart mitral valve repair (MVR).

Methods: The authors' guidance system consists of three major components: TEE, magnetic tracking system, and an image guidance software platform. TEE provides real-time intraoperative images to show the cardiac motion and intracardiac surgical tools.

Interactive Hierarchical-Flow Segmentation of Scar Tissue From Late-Enhancement Cardiac MR Images.

We propose a novel multi-region image segmentation approach to extract myocardial scar tissue from 3-D whole-heart cardiac late-enhancement magnetic resonance images in an interactive manner. For this purpose, we developed a graphical user interface to initialize a fast max-flow-based segmentation algorithm and segment scar accurately with progressive interaction. We propose a partially-ordered Potts (POP) model to multi-region segmentation to properly encode the known spatial consistency of cardiac regions.