Abdominal ostomy surgery has a severe impact on individuals' daily lives. These procedures are typically indicated for conditions such as cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, or traumatic injuries. They involve creating an artificial opening, denominated the stoma, in the abdominal area to divert feces or urine, establishing a connection between the affected organs and the body's exterior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE J Biomed Health Inform
August 2024
Objective - Medical image segmentation is essential for several clinical tasks, including diagnosis, surgical and treatment planning, and image-guided interventions. Deep Learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for several image segmentation scenarios. However, a large and well-annotated dataset is required to effectively train a DL model, which is usually difficult to obtain in clinical practice, especially for 3D images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBreast cancer is a global public health concern. For women with suspicious breast lesions, the current diagnosis requires a biopsy, which is usually guided by ultrasound (US). However, this process is challenging due to the low quality of the US image and the complexity of dealing with the US probe and the surgical needle simultaneously, making it largely reliant on the surgeon's expertise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2023
Ultrasound (US) imaging is a widely used medical imaging modality for the diagnosis, monitoring, and surgical planning for kidney conditions. Thus, accurate segmentation of the kidney and internal structures in US images is essential for the assessment of kidney function and the detection of pathological conditions, such as cysts, tumors, and kidney stones. Therefore, there is a need for automated methods that can accurately segment the kidney and internal structures in US images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2023
Left atrial appendage (LAA) is the major source of thromboembolism in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation. Currently, LAA occlusion can be offered as a treatment for these patients, obstructing the LAA through a percutaneously delivered device. Nevertheless, correct device sizing is a complex task, requiring manual analysis of medical images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2023
Accurate lesion classification as benign or malignant in breast ultrasound (BUS) images is a critical task that requires experienced radiologists and has many challenges, such as poor image quality, artifacts, and high lesion variability. Thus, automatic lesion classification may aid professionals in breast cancer diagnosis. In this scope, computer-aided diagnosis systems have been proposed to assist in medical image interpretation, outperforming the intra and inter-observer variability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2023
Classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals plays an important role in the diagnosis of heart diseases. It is a complex and non-linear signal, which is the first option to preliminary identify specific pathologies/conditions (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2023
Medical image segmentation is a paramount task for several clinical applications, namely for the diagnosis of pathologies, for treatment planning, and for aiding image-guided surgeries. With the development of deep learning, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have become the state-of-the-art for medical image segmentation. However, issues are still raised concerning the precise object boundary delineation, since traditional CNNs can produce non-smooth segmentations with boundary discontinuities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2023
Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer in women. Although mammography is used as the main imaging modality for the diagnosis, robust lesion detection in mammography images is a challenging task, due to the poor contrast of the lesion boundaries and the widely diverse sizes and shapes of the lesions. Deep Learning techniques have been explored to facilitate automatic diagnosis and have produced outstanding outcomes when used for different medical challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper introduces the "SurgT: Surgical Tracking" challenge which was organized in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2022). There were two purposes for the creation of this challenge: (1) the establishment of the first standardized benchmark for the research community to assess soft-tissue trackers; and (2) to encourage the development of unsupervised deep learning methods, given the lack of annotated data in surgery. A dataset of 157 stereo endoscopic videos from 20 clinical cases, along with stereo camera calibration parameters, have been provided.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The daily monitoring of the physiological parameters is essential for monitoring health condition and to prevent health problems. This is possible due to the democratization of numerous types of medical devices and promoted by the interconnection between these and smartphones. Nevertheless, medical devices that connect to smartphones are typically limited to manufacturers applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus led to changes in the lifestyle and human behaviour, which resulted in different consumption patterns of some classes of pharmaceuticals including curative, symptom-relieving, and psychotropic drugs. The trends in the consumption of these compounds are related to their concentrations in wastewater systems, since incompletely metabolised drugs (or their metabolites back transformed into the parental form) may be detected and quantified by analytical methods. Pharmaceuticals are highly recalcitrant compounds and conventional activated sludge processes implemented in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) are ineffective at degrading these substances.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPectus carinatum (PC) is a chest deformity caused by disproportionate growth of the costal cartilages compared with the bony thoracic skeleton, pulling the sternum forwards and leading to its protrusion. Currently, the most common non-invasive treatment is external compressive bracing, by means of an orthosis. While this treatment is widely adopted, the correct magnitude of applied compressive forces remains unknown, leading to suboptimal results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext-aware decision support in the operating room can foster surgical safety and efficiency by leveraging real-time feedback from surgical workflow analysis. Most existing works recognize surgical activities at a coarse-grained level, such as phases, steps or events, leaving out fine-grained interaction details about the surgical activity; yet those are needed for more helpful AI assistance in the operating room. Recognizing surgical actions as triplets of ‹instrument, verb, target› combination delivers more comprehensive details about the activities taking place in surgical videos.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBreast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in the world and the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related death. Treatment is effective in the early stages. Thus, a need to screen considerable portions of the population is crucial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChronic Venous Disorders (CVD) of the lower limbs are one of the most prevalent medical conditions, affecting 35% of adults in Europe and North America. Due to the exponential growth of the aging population and the worsening of CVD with age, it is expected that the healthcare costs and the resources needed for the treatment of CVD will increase in the coming years. The early diagnosis of CVD is fundamental in treatment planning, while the monitoring of its treatment is fundamental to assess a patient's condition and quantify the evolution of CVD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe increase of the aging population brings numerous challenges to health and aesthetic segments. Here, the use of laser therapy for dermatology is expected to increase since it allows for non-invasive and infection-free treatments. However, existing laser devices require doctors' manually handling and visually inspecting the skin.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2022
Chronic Venous Disorders (CVD) of lower limbs are one of the most prevalent medical conditions, affecting 35% of adults in Europe and North America. The early diagnosis of CVD is critical, however, the diagnosis relies on a visual recognition of the various venous disorders which is time- consuming and dependent on the physician's expertise. Thus, automatic strategies for the classification of the CVD severity are claimed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2022
Automatic lesion segmentation in mammography images assists in the diagnosis of breast cancer, which is the most common type of cancer especially among women. The robust segmentation of mammography images has been considered a backbreaking task due to: i) the low contrast of the lesion boundaries; ii) the extremely variable lesions' sizes and shapes; and iii) some extremely small lesions on the mammogram image. To overcome these drawbacks, Deep Learning methods have been implemented and have shown impressive results when applied to medical image segmentation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2022
Ultrasound (US) is a medical imaging modality widely used for diagnosis, monitoring, and guidance of surgical procedures. However, the accurate interpretation of US images is a challenging task. Recently, portable 2D US devices enhanced with Artificial intelligence (AI) methods to identify, in real-time, specific organs are widely spreading worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc
July 2022
Ultrasound (US) imaging despite being safe, cost-effective, and radiation-free, presents poor quality and artifacts, requiring specific medical training in US probe handling and image evaluation. The use of simulators to train physicians has proven its effectiveness, but most of them require specific facilities and hardware. In the last few years, augmented reality has gained relevance to simulate real scenarios which can avoid large setups and broaden medical training to more physicians.
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