Intima-medial thickness homogeneity in the common carotid artery: measurement method and preliminary clinical study.

Background: To propose and test in a preliminary clinical study a novel method for calculating intima-medial thickness (IMT) homogeneity (IMTH).

Methods: IMT was measured off-line on every horizontal pixel line along the far wall of the common carotid artery, with previously validated software. IMTH was assessed by the SD, coefficient of variation, and interval distribution of obtained IMT values.

Ultrasound intima-media segmentation using Hough transform and dual snake model.

Common carotid artery intima-media thickness (IMT), which is usually measured upon ultrasound images, is an important indicator to cardiovascular diseases. This paper proposes a snake model based segmentation method to automatically detect the boundary of intima-media for IMT measurement. In the proposed method, two contours are initialized from line segments generated by Hough transform and then evolved simultaneously by dual snake model for boundary detection.

Computer aided diagnosis of fatty liver ultrasonic images based on support vector machine.

B-scan ultrasound is the primary means for the diagnosis of fatty liver. However, due to use of various ultrasound equipments, poor quality of ultrasonic images and physical differences of patients, fatty liver diagnosis is mainly qualitative, and often depends on the subjective judgment of technicians and doctors. Therefore, computer-aided feature extraction and quantitative analysis of liver B-scan ultrasonic images will help to improve clinical diagnostic accuracy, repeatability and efficiency, and could provide a measure for severity of hepatic steatosis.

Registration of in vivo magnetic resonance T1-weighted brain images to triphenyltetrazolium chloride stained sections in small animals.

Signal changes observed in high-resolution in vivo magnetic resonance (MR) images acquired during cerebral ischemia in small animal models must be correlated to molecular indicators of tissue damage obtained from digitized histological brain sections. An effective image registration technique that incorporates both a linear and non-linear thin plate spline transform was developed to compensate the distortions that occur in the brain during the extraction, fixation, and staining process. Features in different layers of the brain were utilized in conjunction with a radial guideline-assisted landmark selection method to register tissue layers with few distinguishing characteristics.