Toward Decision Support System for Lower Limb Endovascular Revascularization.

Vascular surgeons take decisions on the revascularization technics when surgery is needed for patients with Lower Extremities Arterial Disease (LEAD). This decision requires experience, good knowledge of official recommandations and new technics and an exhaustive description of the patient status. The Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a good candidate to clinical decision support.

Segmentation of cardiac infarction in delayed-enhancement MRI using probability map and transformers-based neural networks.

Background And Objective: Automatic segmentation of myocardial infarction is of great clinical interest for the quantitative evaluation of myocardial infarction (MI). Late Gadolinium Enhancement cardiac MRI (LGE-MRI) is commonly used in clinical practice to quantify MI, which is crucial for clinical diagnosis and treatment of cardiac diseases. However, the segmentation of infarcted tissue in LGE-MRI is highly challenging due to its high anisotropy and inhomogeneities.

Evaluation of the Needle Positioning Accuracy of a Light Puncture Robot Under MRI Guidance: Results of a Clinical Trial on Healthy Volunteers.

Purpose: To assess the accuracy of Light Puncture Robot (LPR) as a patient-mounted robot, in positioning a sham needle under MRI guidance for abdominal percutaneous interventions.

Materials And Methods: This monocentric, prospective and non-controlled study was approved by the ethics review board. The study evaluated the accuracy of LPR V3 to achieve a virtual puncture in 20 healthy volunteers.

Segmentation, Separation and Pose Estimation of Prostate Brachytherapy Seeds in CT Images.

Goal: In this paper, we address the development of an automatic approach for the computation of pose information (position + orientation) of prostate brachytherapy loose seeds from 3-D CT images.

Methods: From an initial detection of a set of seed candidates in CT images using a threshold and connected component method, the orientation of each individual seed is estimated by using the principal components analysis method. The main originality of this approach is the ability to classify the detected objects based on a priori intensity and volume information and to separate groups of closely spaced seeds using three competing clustering methods: the standard and a modified k-means method and a Gaussian mixture model with an expectation-maximization algorithm.

Using CamiTK for rapid prototyping of interactive computer assisted medical intervention applications.

Computer Assisted Medical Intervention (CAMI hereafter) is a complex multi-disciplinary field. CAMI research requires the collaboration of experts in several fields as diverse as medicine, computer science, mathematics, instrumentation, signal processing, mechanics, modeling, automatics, optics, etc. CamiTK is a modular framework that helps researchers and clinicians to collaborate together in order to prototype CAMI applications by regrouping the knowledge and expertise from each discipline.

Interventional radiology robot for CT and MRI guided percutaneous interventions.

This paper introduces a new patient-mounted CT and MRI guided interventional radiology robot for percutaneous needle interventions. The 5 DOF robot uses ultrasonic motors and pneumatics to position the needle and then insert it progressively. The needle position and inclination can be registered in the images using two strategically placed fiducials visible in both imaging modalities.

Blockwise processing applied to brain microvascular network study.

The study of cerebral microvascular networks requires high-resolution images. However, to obtain statistically relevant results, a large area of the brain (several square millimeters) must be analyzed. This leads us to consider huge images, too large to be loaded and processed at once in the memory of a standard computer.

A novel three-dimensional computer-assisted method for a quantitative study of microvascular networks of the human cerebral cortex.

Objective: Detailed information on microvascular network anatomy is a requirement for understanding several aspects of microcirculation, including oxygen transport, distributions of pressure, and wall shear stress in microvessels, regulation of blood flow, and interpretation of hemodynamically based functional imaging methods, but very few quantitative data on the human brain microcirculation are available. The main objective of this study is to propose a new method to analyze this microcirculation.

Methods: From thick sections of india ink-injected human brain, using confocal laser microscopy, the authors developed algorithms adapted to very large data sets to automatically extract and analyze center lines together with diameters of thousands of brain microvessels within a large cortex area.