Durable lesion formation while avoiding esophageal injury during ablation of atrial fibrillation: Lessons learned from late gadolinium MR imaging.

Introduction: Adequate catheter/atrial tissue contact is critical for lesion formation during radiofrequency (RF) ablation of atrial fibrillation (AF). Late gadolinium enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (LGE-MRI) is a unique tool for the evaluation of lesion formation and detection of acute esophageal injury.

Methods: LGE-MRIs were obtained prior, within 24 hours of, and at 115 ± 62 days after first AF ablation in 36 patients.

Case study: an evaluation of user-assisted hierarchical watershed segmentation.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an interactive, three-dimensional image segmentation technique that relies on watersheds. This paper presents two user-based case studies, which include two different groups of domain experts. Subjects manipulate a graphics-based front end to a hierarchy of segmented regions generated from a watershed segmentation algorithm, which is implemented in the Insight Toolkit.

GIST: an interactive, GPU-based level set segmentation tool for 3D medical images.

While level sets have demonstrated a great potential for 3D medical image segmentation, their usefulness has been limited by two problems. First, 3D level sets are relatively slow to compute. Second, their formulation usually entails several free parameters which can be very difficult to correctly tune for specific applications.