Effects of Lung Ultrasound Technique and Pleural Line Depth on In Vitro and In Vivo Measurements of Pleural Line Thickness.

Objective: The aim of the work described here was to determine the effects of imaging protocol, technique and pleural line depth on measured pleural line thickness (PLT).

Methods: Sonograms were performed on a phantom and healthy volunteers. In vitro, pleural line depth, transducer type (5-1 MHz phased array vs.

Weakly- and Semisupervised Probabilistic Segmentation and Quantification of Reverberation Artifacts.

We propose a weakly- and semisupervised, probabilistic needle-and-reverberation-artifact segmentation algorithm to separate the desired tissue-based pixel values from the superimposed artifacts. Our method models the intensity decay of artifact intensities and is designed to minimize the human labeling error. Ultrasound image quality has continually been improving.

W-Net: Dense and diagnostic semantic segmentation of subcutaneous and breast tissue in ultrasound images by incorporating ultrasound RF waveform data.

We study the use of raw ultrasound waveforms, often referred to as the "Radio Frequency" (RF) data, for the semantic segmentation of ultrasound scans to carry out dense and diagnostic labeling. We present W-Net, a novel Convolution Neural Network (CNN) framework that employs the raw ultrasound waveforms in addition to the grey ultrasound image to semantically segment and label tissues for anatomical, pathological, or other diagnostic purposes. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first deep-learning or CNN approach for segmentation that analyzes ultrasound raw RF data along with the grey image.

Good and bad boundaries in ultrasound compounding: preserving anatomic boundaries while suppressing artifacts.

Purpose: Ultrasound compounding is to combine sonographic information captured from different angles and produce a single image. It is important for multi-view reconstruction, but as of yet there is no consensus on best practices for compounding. Current popular methods inevitably suppress or altogether leave out bright or dark regions that are useful and potentially introduce new artifacts.

Accurate tissue interface segmentation via adversarial pre-segmentation of anterior segment OCT images.

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is an imaging modality that has been widely adopted for visualizing corneal, retinal and limbal tissue structure with micron resolution. It can be used to diagnose pathological conditions of the eye, and for developing pre-operative surgical plans. In contrast to the posterior retina, imaging the anterior tissue structures, such as the limbus and cornea, results in B-scans that exhibit increased speckle noise patterns and imaging artifacts.

Improved deep learning-based macromolecules structure classification from electron cryo-tomograms.

Cellular processes are governed by macromolecular complexes inside the cell. Study of the native structures of macromolecular complexes has been extremely difficult due to lack of data. With recent breakthroughs in Cellular Electron Cryo-Tomography (CECT) 3D imaging technology, it is now possible for researchers to gain accesses to fully study and understand the macro-molecular structures single cells.

Integrating images from a moveable tracked display of three-dimensional data.

This paper describes a novel method for displaying data obtained by three-dimensional medical imaging, by which the position and orientation of a freely movable screen are optically tracked and used in real time to select the current slice from the data set for presentation. With this method, which we call a "freely moving medical image", the screen and imaged data are registered to a common coordinate system in space external to the user, at adjustable scale, and are available for free exploration. The three-dimensional image data occupy empty space, as if an invisible patient is being sliced by the moving screen.

Slant Perception Under Stereomicroscopy.

Objective These studies used threshold and slant-matching tasks to assess and quantitatively measure human perception of 3-D planar images viewed through a stereomicroscope. The results are intended for use in developing augmented-reality surgical aids. Background Substantial research demonstrates that slant perception is performed with high accuracy from monocular and binocular cues, but less research concerns the effects of magnification.

Ultrasound registration: A review.

This article is a review of registration algorithms for use between ultrasound images (monomodal image-based ultrasound registration). Ultrasound is safe, inexpensive, and real-time, providing many advantages for clinical and scientific use on both humans and animals, but ultrasound images are also notoriously noisy and subject to several unique artifacts/distortions. This paper introduces the topic and unique aspects of ultrasound-to-ultrasound image registration, providing a broad introduction and summary of the literature and the field.

Psychophysical evaluation of haptic perception under augmentation by a handheld device.

Objective: This study investigated the effectiveness of force augmentation in haptic perception tasks.

Background: Considerable engineering effort has been devoted to developing force augmented reality (AR) systems to assist users in delicate procedures like microsurgery. In contrast, far less has been done to characterize the behavioral outcomes of these systems, and no research has systematically examined the impact of sensory and perceptual processes on force augmentation effectiveness.

Refocusing a scanned laser projector for small and bright images: simultaneously controlling the profile of the laser beam and the boundary of the image.

This paper describes a projection system for augmenting a scanned laser projector to create very small, very bright images for use in a microsurgical augmented reality system. Normal optical design approaches are insufficient because the laser beam profile differs optically from the aggregate image. We propose a novel arrangement of two lens groups working together to simultaneously adjust both the laser beam of the projector (individual pixels) and the spatial envelope containing them (the entire image) to the desired sizes.

FingerSight: Fingertip Haptic Sensing of the Visual Environment.

We present a novel device mounted on the fingertip for acquiring and transmitting visual information through haptic channels. In contrast to previous systems in which the user interrogates an intermediate representation of visual information, such as a tactile display representing a camera generated image, our device uses a fingertip-mounted camera and haptic stimulator to allow the user to feel visual features directly from the environment. Visual features ranging from simple intensity or oriented edges to more complex information identified automatically about objects in the environment may be translated in this manner into haptic stimulation of the finger.

A fully automated approach to prostate biopsy segmentation based on level-set and mean filtering.

With modern automated microscopes and digital cameras, pathologists no longer have to examine samples looking through microscope binoculars. Instead, the slide is digitized to an image, which can then be examined on a screen. This creates the possibility for computers to analyze the image.

Shells and Spheres: An n-Dimensional Framework for Medial-Based Image Segmentation.

We have developed a method for extracting anatomical shape models from n-dimensional images using an image analysis framework we call Shells and Spheres. This framework utilizes a set of spherical operators centered at each image pixel, grown to reach, but not cross, the nearest object boundary by incorporating "shells" of pixel intensity values while analyzing intensity mean, variance, and first-order moment. Pairs of spheres on opposite sides of putative boundaries are then analyzed to determine boundary reflectance which is used to further constrain sphere size, establishing a consensus as to boundary location.

Real-time tomographic holography for augmented reality.

The concept and instantiation of real-time tomographic holography (RTTH) for augmented reality is presented. RTTH enables natural hand-eye coordination to guide invasive medical procedures without requiring tracking or a head-mounted device. It places a real-time virtual image of an object's cross section into its actual location, without noticeable viewpoint dependence (e.