Vein wall shrinkage induced by thermal coagulation with high-intensity-focused ultrasound: numerical modeling and experiments in sheep.

Background: Varicose veins are a common disease that may significantly affect quality of life. Different approaches are currently used in clinical practice to treat this pathology.

Materials And Methods: In thermal therapy (radiofrequency or laser therapy), the vein is directly heated to a high temperature to induce vein wall coagulation, and the heat induces denaturation of the intramural collagen, which results macroscopically in vein shrinkage.

Efficacy and safety assessment of an ultrasound-based thermal treatment of varicose veins in a sheep model.

Varicose veins are a common pathology that can be treated by endovenous thermal procedures like radiofrequency ablation (RFA). Such catheter-based techniques consist in raising the temperature of the vein wall to 70 to 120 °C to induce vein wall coagulation. Although effective, this treatment option is not suited for all types of veins and can be technically challenging.

Automatic segmentation of antenatal 3-D ultrasound images.

The development of 3-D ultrasonic probes and 3-D ultrasound (3DUS) imaging offers new functionalities that call for specific image processing developments. In this paper, we propose an original method for the segmentation of the utero-fetal unit (UFU) from 3DUS volumes, acquired during the first trimester of gestation. UFU segmentation is required for a number of tasks, such as precise organ delineation, 3-D modeling, quantitative measurements, and evaluation of the clinical impact of 3-D imaging.

Hybrid 3D pregnant woman and fetus modeling from medical imaging for dosimetry studies.

Purpose: Numerical simulations studying the interactions between radiations and biological tissues require the use of three-dimensional models of the human anatomy at various ages and in various positions. Several detailed and flexible models exist for adults and children and have been extensively used for dosimetry. On the other hand, progress of simulation studies focusing on pregnant women and the fetus have been limited by the fact that only a small number of models exist with rather coarse anatomical details and a poor representation of the anatomical variability of the fetus shape and its position over the entire gestation.

Utero-fetal unit and pregnant woman modeling using a computer graphics approach for dosimetry studies.

Potential sanitary effects related to electromagnetic fields exposure raise public concerns, especially for fetuses during pregnancy. Human fetus exposure can only be assessed through simulated dosimetry studies, performed on anthropomorphic models of pregnant women. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to generate a set of detailed utero-fetal unit (UFU) 3D models during the first and third trimesters of pregnancy, based on segmented 3D ultrasound and MRI data.