| 1. |
- Dahlström, Nils, 1969-
(författare)
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Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Hepatobiliary System Using Hepatocyte-Specific Contrast Media
- 2009
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There are two Gadolinium-based liver-specific contrast media for Magnetic Resonance Imaging on the market, Gd-BOPTA (MultiHance®, Bracco Imaging, Milan, Italy) and Gd-EOB-DTPA (Primovist®, Bayer Schering Pharma, Berlin, Germany). The aim of this study in two parts was to evaluate the dynamics of biliary, parenchymal and vascular enhancement using these contrast media in healthy subjects. Ten healthy volunteers were examined in a 1.5 T magnetic resonance system using three-dimensional Volumetric Interpolated Breath-Hold (VIBE) sequences for dynamic imaging with both contrast media – at two different occasions – until five hours after injection. The doses given were 0.025 mmol/kg for Gd-EOB-DTPA and 0.1 mmol/kg for Gd-BOPTA. The enhancement over time of the common biliary duct in contrast to the liver parenchyma was analyzed in the first study. This was followed by a study of the image contrasts of the hepatic artery, portal vein and middle hepatic vein versus the liver parenchyma.While Gd-EOB-DTPA gave an earlier and more prolonged enhancement of the biliary duct, Gd-BOPTA achieved higher image contrast for all vessels studied, during the arterial and portal venous phases. There was no significant difference in the maximal enhancement obtained in the liver parenchyma.At the obtained time-points and at the dosage used, the high contrast between the common biliary duct and liver parenchyma had an earlier onset and longer duration for Gd-EOB-DTPA, while Gd-BOPTA achieved higher maximal enhancement of the hepatic artery, portal vein and middle hepatic vein than Gd-EOB-DTPA. Diseases of the liver and biliary system may affect the vasculature, parenchyma, biliary excretion or a combination of these. The clinical context regarding the relative importance of vascular, hepatic parenchymal and biliary processes should determine the choice of contrast media for each patient and examination.
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| 2. |
- Persson, Anders, 1953-
(författare)
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Volume imaging of the abdomen : three-dimensional visualisation of tubular structures in the body with CT and MRI
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The overwhelming amount of image-based information in modem medicine makes it crucial to develop methods to handle and analyze images and make them comprehensible for users. The aim of this thesis was to study the radiological practice of three-dimensional (3D) visualization of tubular structures in the body with CT and MRI. All the studies cancern 3D imaging of tubular structures with camputed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The first three studies examine the abdominal aorta; the two later ones the, bile ducts.Study I compared measurements of aorta diameters taken from MR images presented using two visualization methods - maximum intensity projection (MlP) and volume rendering (VRT) - with invasive angiography (DSA) and CT as reference methods. Mean diameters of MR images were smaller than those from DSA and CT when MlP was used, but in general not when VRT was used.Study II evaluated the dependence on the observer and the choice of method and settings during rendering using the same material as in Study 1. In both MlP and VRT, the choice of settings had significant influence on the results. With DSA as the reference method, VRT gave larger measurement errors than MIP when the rendering parameters were set to fixed values, but not if the user was allowed to select the settings freely.Study III evaluated three new techniques for standardizing VRT protocols for MRA. Inter-reader variability and agreement with DSA were studied by comparing diameter measurements of the abdominal aorta obtained by the three new techniques, by VRT with freely chosen parameters and by MlP. All three new methods were significantly better than MlP and VRT with freely chosen parameters conceming inter-observer agreement. Agreement with DSA was significantly better for one of the methods. Standardized protocols seem to have a potential to make VRT a clinically useful alternative to MlP for MR angiography measurements.Study IV evaluated CT imaging of the bile ducts after drip intravenous infusion of the contrast medium iotroxate (CT cholangiography) in terms of adverse effects and visibility. With infusion time adjusted for individual variation in serum bilirubin concentration, a total side-effect frequency of less than 1% was found. A systematic review of previously published studies indicated a frequency of 2.3%. Good contrast excretion and visualization of bile ducts even in patients with elevated bilirubin levels were noted.Study V evaluated the diagnostic benefits of the same imaging method by comparing it with findings from surgery and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP). The consensus sensitivity and specificity for diagnosing biliary stones was 88% and 94%, respectively. The use of VRT improved diagnostic certainty in 14% of the evaluatians, and the visualization of ductal stones was improved in 38% of the positive cases.In conclusion, volume rendering technique with standardized parameters may become a clinically useful tool in the clinical MRI environment. DIC-CT with bilirubin-governed infusion time and volume rendering post-processing produces detailed images of the biliary tree, resulting in good sensitivity and specificity. Moreover the safety is acceptable.
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| 3. |
- Ragnehed, Mattias, 1976-
(författare)
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Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Clinical Diagnosis : Exploring and Improving the Examination Chain
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a relatively new imaging technique, first reported in 1992, which enables mapping of brain functions with high spatial resolution. Functionally active areas are distinguished by a small signal increase mediated by changes in local blood oxygenation in response to neural activity. The ability to non-invasively map brain function and the large number of MRI scanners quickly made the method very popular, and fMRI have had a huge impact on the study of brain function, both in healthy and diseased subjects.The most common clinical application of fMRI is pre-surgical mapping of brain functions in order to optimise surgical interventions. The clinical fMRI examination procedure can be divided into four integrated parts: (1) patient preparation, (2) image acquisition, (3) image analysis and (4) clinical decision. In this thesis, important aspects of all parts of the fMRI examination procedure are explored with the aim to provide recommendations and methods for prosperous clinical usage of the technique.The most important results of the thesis were: (I) administration of low doses of diazepam to reduce anxiety did not invalidate fMRI mapping results of primary motor and language areas, (II) the choice of visual stimuli equipment can have severe impact on the mapping of visual areas, (III) three-dimensional fMRI imaging sequences did not perform better than two-dimensional imaging sequences, (IV) adaptive spatial filtering can improve the fMRI data analysis, (V) clinical decisions should not be based on activation results from a single statistical threshold.
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| 4. |
- Wang, Chunliang, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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An automatic seeding method for coronary artery segmentation and skeletonization in CTA
- 2008
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Ingår i: MIDAS Journal. ; 43, s. 1-8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- An automatic seeding method for coronary artery segmentation and skeletonization is presented. The new method includes automatic removal of the rib cage, tracing of the ascending aorta and initial planting of seeds for the coronary arteries. The automatic seeds are then passed on to a �virtual contrast injection� algorithm performing segmentation and skeletonization. In preliminary experiments, most main branches of the coronary tree were segmented and skeletonized without any user interaction.
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| 5. |
- Wang, Chunliang, 1980-
(författare)
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Computer Assisted Coronary CT Angiography Analysis : Disease-centered Software Development
- 2009
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The substantial advances of coronary CTA have resulted in a boost of use of this new technique in the last several years, which brings a big challenge to radiologists by the increasing number of exams and the large amount of data for each patient. The main goal of this study was to develop a computer tool to facilitate coronary CTA analysis by combining knowledge of medicine and image processing.Firstly, a competing fuzzy connectedness tree algorithm was developed to segment the coronary arteries and extract centerlines for each branch. The new algorithm, which is an extension of the “virtual contrast injection” method, preserves the low density soft tissue around the coronary, which reduces the possibility of introducing false positive stenoses during segmentation.Secondly, this algorithm was implemented in open source software in which multiple visualization techniques were integrated into an intuitive user interface to facilitate user interaction and provide good over¬views of the processing results. Considerable efforts were put on optimizing the computa¬tional speed of the algorithm to meet the clinical requirements.Thirdly, an automatic seeding method, that can automatically remove rib cage and recognize the aortic root, was introduced into the interactive segmentation workflow to further minimize the requirement of user interactivity during post-processing. The automatic procedure is carried out right after the images are received, which saves users time after they open the data. Vessel enhance¬ment and quantitative 2D vessel contour analysis are also included in this new version of the software. In our preliminary experience, visually accurate segmentation results of major branches have been achieved in 74 cases (42 cases reported in paper II and 32 cases in paper III) using our software with limited user interaction. On 128 branches of 32 patients, the average overlap between the centerline created in our software and the manually created reference standard was 96.0%. The average distance between them was 0.38 mm, lower than the mean voxel size. The automatic procedure ran for 3-5 min as a single-thread application in the background. Interactive processing took 3 min in average with the latest version of software. In conclusion, the presented software provides fast and automatic coron¬ary artery segmentation and visualization. The accuracy of the centerline tracking was found to be acceptable when compared to manually created centerlines.
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| 6. |
- Weistrand, Ola, 1975-
(författare)
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Global Shape Description of Digital Objects
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- New methods for global shape description of three-dimensional digital objects are presented. The shape of an object is first represented by a digital surface where the faces are either triangles or quadrilaterals. Techniques for computing a high-quality parameterization of the surface are developed and this parameterization is used to approximate the shape of the object. Spherical harmonics are used as basis functions for approximations of the coordinate functions. Information about the global shape is then captured by the coefficients in the spherical harmonics expansions.For a starshaped object it is shown how a parameterization can be computed by a projection from its surface onto the unit sphere. An algorithm for computing the position at which the centre of the sphere should be placed, is presented. This algorithm is suited for digital voxel objects. Most of the work is concerned with digital objects whose surfaces are homeomorphic to the sphere. The standard method for computing parameterizations of such surfaces is shown to fail on many objects. This is due to the large distortions of the geometric properties of the surface that often occur with this method. Algorithms to handle this problem are suggested. Non-linear optimization methods are used to find a mapping between a surface and the sphere that minimizes geometric distortion and is useful as a parameterization of the surface. The methods can be applied, for example, in medical imaging for shape recognition, detection of shape deformations and shape comparisons of three-dimensional objects.
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