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Biomedical subjects

J J Heine

Publications and source records attributed to J J Heine.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Review and evaluation of MRI nonuniformity corrections for brain tumor response measurements.

Current MRI nonuniformity correction techniques are reviewed and investigated. Many approaches are used to remedy this artifact, but it is not clear which method is the most appropriate in a given situation, as the applications have been with different MRI coils and different clinical applications. In this work four widely used nonuniformity correction techniques are investigated in order to assess the effect on tumor response measurements (change in tumor volume over time): a phantom correction method, an image smoothing technique, homomorphic filtering, and surface fitting approach. Six brain tumor cases with baseline and follow-up MRIs after treatment with varying degrees of difficulty of segmentation were analyzed without and with each of the nonuniformity corrections. Different methods give significantly different correction images, indicating that rf nonuniformity correction is not yet well understood. No improvement in tumor segmentation or in tumor growth/shrinkage assessment was achieved using any of the evaluated corrections.

Biophysical Phenomena

Multiresolution statistical analysis of high-resolution digital mammograms.

A multiresolution statistical method for identifying clinically normal tissue in digitized mammograms is used to construct an algorithm for separating normal regions from potentially abnormal regions; that is, small regions that may contain isolated calcifications. This is the initial phase of the development of a general method for the automatic recognition of normal mammograms. The first step is to decompose the image with a wavelet expansion that yields a sum of independent images, each containing different levels of image detail. When calcifications are present, there is strong empirical evidence that only some of the image components are necessary for the purpose of detecting a deviation from normal. The underlying statistic for each of the selected expansion components can be modeled with a simple parametric probability distribution function. This function serves as an instrument for the development of a statistical test that allows for the recognition of normal tissue regions. The distribution function depends on only one parameter, and this parameter itself has an underlying statistical distribution. The values of this parameter define a summary statistic that can be used to set detection error rates. Once the summary statistic is determined, spatial filters that are matched to resolution are applied independently to each selected expansion image. Regions of the image that correlate with the normal statistical model are discarded and regions in disagreement (suspicious areas) are flagged. These results are combined to produce a detection output image consisting only of suspicious areas. This type of detection output is amenable to further processing that may ultimately lead to a fully automated algorithm for the identification of normal mammograms.

Algorithms

MRI segmentation: methods and applications.

The current literature on MRI segmentation methods is reviewed. Particular emphasis is placed on the relative merits of single image versus multispectral segmentation, and supervised versus unsupervised segmentation methods. Image pre-processing and registration are discussed, as well as methods of validation. The application of MRI segmentation for tumor volume measurements during the course of therapy is presented here as an example, illustrating problems associated with inter- and intra-observer variations inherent to supervised methods.

Head