Haptic experience to significantly motivate anatomy learning in medical students.

Background: Currently, multiple tools exist to teach and learn anatomy, but finding an adequate activity is challenging. However, it can be achieved through haptic experiences, where motivation is the means of a significant learning process. This study aimed to evaluate a haptic experience to determine if a tactile and painting with color marker interactive experience, established a better learning process in comparison to the traditional 2D workshop on printed paper with photographs.

Standardization of penile angle estimation with a semi-automated algorithm.

Introduction: Penile curvature (PC) refers to an abnormal bending of the main longitudinal axis of the penis. It is frequently associated to hypospadias. To date, accurate and objective evaluation of PC is not easily reproducible amongst surgeons and there are no stablished protocols on how to measure PC in a standard way and in real-time to guide intraoperative decision making.

Towards optimal flow diverter porosity for the treatment of intracranial aneurysm.

Purpose: Low-porosity endovascular stents, known as flow diverters (FDs), have been proposed as an effective and minimally invasive treatment for sidewall intracranial aneurysms (IAs). Although it has been reported that the efficacy of a FD is substantially influenced by its porosity, clinical doctors would clearly prefer to do their interventions optimally based on refined quantitative data. This study focuses on the association between the porosity configurations and the FD efficacy, in order to provide practical data to help the clinical doctors optimize the interventions.

A tree-matching algorithm: Application to airways in CT images of subjects with the acute respiratory distress syndrome.

To match anatomical trees such as airways, we propose a graph-based strategy combined with an appropriate distance function. The strategy was devised to cope with topological and geometrical differences that may arise between trees corresponding to the same subject, but extracted from images acquired in different conditions. The proposed distance function, called father/family distance, combines topological and geometrical information in a single measure, by calculating a sum of path-to-path distances between sub-trees of limited extent.

Fast-marching contours for the segmentation of vessel lumen in CTA cross-sections.

This work deals with the segmentation of the arterial lumen in cross-sections of CT angiography (CTA) images, by means of active contours. Within the context of the fast-marching method, a new speed-control function is proposed in order to cope with strongly variable contrasts along the perimeter of the contour. This function was devised to guarantee the existence of a time T at which the fast-marching front fits the actual boundary of the vessel lumen, despite calcifications and other neighboring structures.