Biomedical Imaging / Medical Imaging
Elham Mohammadi; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam
Volume 16, Issue 1 , May 2022, , Pages 63-74
Abstract
Real-time MRI using highly undersampled radial acquisition can be used for dynamic assessments of the heart. The main challenges, however, are the presence of severe undersampling artifacts in the periphery of the images. In this study, to improve the visual quality of the final real-time images, a new ...
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Real-time MRI using highly undersampled radial acquisition can be used for dynamic assessments of the heart. The main challenges, however, are the presence of severe undersampling artifacts in the periphery of the images. In this study, to improve the visual quality of the final real-time images, a new method for the acquisition of successive frames based on a radial trajectory with the turned arrangement is presented. Accordingly, by combining the information obtained from successive frames, it is possible to reconstruct images with high and low spatial resolution. In the proposed method, specifically due to the use of the Polar Fourier Transform reconstruction method, reconstructed images with two different resolutions can be combined to reduce the visual effects of undersampling artifacts. In this paper, the proposed method has been used especially for the real-time radially tagged images to increase the efficiency and accuracy of measuring left ventricular rotation motion. According to the simulation results, the structural similarity measure is improved from 0.6 to 0.8. Real-time imaging with a time resolution of 46 ms of healthy individuals also shows that while the temporal resolution of the rotational information is well preserved, the visual quality of images is improved.
Biomedical Imaging / Medical Imaging
Farzaneh Keyvanfard; Alireza Rahiminasab; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam
Volume 15, Issue 3 , December 2021, , Pages 211-220
Abstract
In brain disorders, both the brain structural and functional connectivity are altered and cause different behavioral symptoms. Recognizing these variations can help us to diagnose, treat, and control its progression. Schizophrenia is one of these mental disorders that widely affects the brain structure ...
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In brain disorders, both the brain structural and functional connectivity are altered and cause different behavioral symptoms. Recognizing these variations can help us to diagnose, treat, and control its progression. Schizophrenia is one of these mental disorders that widely affects the brain structure and function. Investigation of brain variations in this disease has commonly been based on voxel-wise analysis or region-based studies. The aim of this study is to evaluate brain structure and function alterations in schizophrenia patients comparing to healthy control from the brain connectivity perspective. For this purpose, using the statistical test method, a comparison was made between all the structural and functional connections in the brain of 92 healthy individuals and 37 schizophrenia patients obtained from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) respectively. The findings of this study indicate that the number of altered edges in the brain functional network of patients is about 4 times more than the number of varied structural connections, which indicates the high impact of this disorder on brain function. Also, examination of the number of altered edges connected to each node, the affected areas in this disease were identified and it was shown that the schizophrenia patients’ brain has changed in parts of the brain subnetworks related to the default mode network (DMN), attention, somatomotor and vision networks. It was also shown that the altered brain structural connections of patients are involved in the areas of the superior frontal gyrus, temporal gyrus and part of the occipital cortex which are mostly shown relative increasing of the structural connectivity weights. The results of this study indicate the widespread effect of this disorder on the brain and suggest that the occurrence of some abnormal behaviors in schizophrenia patients may be due to some increased structural connectivity weights.
Bioelectrics
Farzaneh Keyvanfard; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam
Volume 13, Issue 2 , August 2019, , Pages 147-158
Abstract
Brain as the most complex organ in the human body has been investigated from various aspects. The greatest origin of this complexity is due to the fact that, despite the fixed architecture of brain structure (physical connections), the functional connectivity is in a constantly changing state, resulting ...
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Brain as the most complex organ in the human body has been investigated from various aspects. The greatest origin of this complexity is due to the fact that, despite the fixed architecture of brain structure (physical connections), the functional connectivity is in a constantly changing state, resulting to different behaviors. In many mental diseases, both brain structural and functional connectivities and their relationship are changed and cause different symptoms. Investigation of brain connectivity variations in the disease may help to better understanding of the relationship between brain structure and function. One of the most severe and debilitating brain disorders is Schizophrenia in which both brain structure and function are involved. Among all available methods, multimodal analysis of data has been recently gained great interest to provide the capability of extracting association between separate neuroimaging data. However, due to their voxel based viewpoint, relationship between brain connectivities cannot be inferred. In this study, the joint independent component analysis (jICA) has been proposed to investigate the relationship between brain functional and structural connectivity. We applied the suggested approach to combine functional and structural connectivity, in order to assess abnormalities underlying schizophrenic patients relative to healthy people. The findings suggest that the correspondence between brain function and structure is not necessarily one-to-one. The results also indicated that variations in several structural fibers, such as superior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior longitudinal fasciculus, are associated with functional changes in the temporal and frontal lobes. Besides, analyzing the nodal strength and shortest path length in the obtained subnetworks demonstrates that the functional subnetworks efficiency in parallel information transfer in schizophrenic patients is reduced. Overall, the outcomes point out the capability of the proposed method to better understanding of brain functional and structural connectivity association and its variations in brain disorders.
Cardiovascular Biomechanics
Navid Soltani; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam; Nasser Faturaee; Saeed Seyri; Aisa Rassoli
Volume 8, Issue 4 , February 2015, , Pages 359-370
Abstract
Experimental tests and equations on the continuum mechanics are used in order to obtain the constitutive models of soft tissue using in predictive heart simulation. Considering the myocardium as one of the important tissues, in this paper first the morphology and structure of myocardium has been reviewed ...
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Experimental tests and equations on the continuum mechanics are used in order to obtain the constitutive models of soft tissue using in predictive heart simulation. Considering the myocardium as one of the important tissues, in this paper first the morphology and structure of myocardium has been reviewed and the mechanical response of passive form of this tissue has been investigated. The myocardium of left ventricle was considered as non linear elastic, in-compressible and non homogeneous material and using of bi-axial test in 3 lambs myocardium on fiber direction; a constitutive model of this tissue has been proposed. The model so constructed is then evaluated against the biaxial data, and values of the material constants have been obtained by curve fitting so the final model states the strain-energy function as cauchy's invariants which can be helpful in heart simulation.
Biomedical Image Processing / Medical Image Processing
Alireza Rahimpour; Abbas Nasiraei Moghaddam
Volume 6, Issue 3 , June 2012, , Pages 195-205
Abstract
Nowadays eye gaze tracking has wide range of applications in human computer interaction. One of these applications is using trajectory of eye gaze instead of foot or hand for disabled people to execute some commands. Various methods have been proposed, some of this methods can successfully track the ...
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Nowadays eye gaze tracking has wide range of applications in human computer interaction. One of these applications is using trajectory of eye gaze instead of foot or hand for disabled people to execute some commands. Various methods have been proposed, some of this methods can successfully track the eye gaze. However, they always require specific circumstances, training or are not capable of real-time performance. In this paper, we proposed a framework to track eye gaze in real-time by using a simple and low cost webcam mounted on ordinary laptops. This process widely exploits the weighted normalized correlation function in an adaptive template matching approach. The implemented system tracks the face and also extracts some eye features such as iris position, eye corners and sclera region in eyes, in real time. These features are used in eye gaze estimation. Also the influence of illumination changes, background alterations, different faces and face movements is minimized as much as possible. The implemented gaze tracking system is able to control the motions of mouse cursor and click on an onscreen keyboard in real time.
