Sharif Digital Repository

One crucial part of an image registration algorithm is utilization of an appropriate similarity metric. For common similarity metrics such as CC or MI, it is assumed that the intensities of image pixels are independent from each other and stationary. Accepting these assumptions, one will have difficulty doing image registration in the presence of spatially varying intensity distortion. In Myronenko et al. [5] a solution based on minimization of residual complexity is introduced to solve this problem. In this work, the weakness of RC method is investigated for more complex spatially varying intensity distortions and a modification of this method is presented to improve its performance in such... 

Atrogenic injuries to paraspinal muscles during the posterior lumbar surgery (PLS) cause a reduction in their cross-sectional areas (CSAs) and contractile densities over time post-surgery. This study aims to quantify such alterations. Method: Pre- and postoperative CSAs (~6 months interval) of all paraspinal muscles were measured in six patients undergoing PLS using a 3-T magnetic resonance (MR) scanner to quantify the alterations in geometrical and tissue effective contractile (non-fatty) CSAs of these muscles at all lumbar levels. To examine the presence of any confounding effects on recorded changes within ~7-month period, measurements were also carried out on ten healthy volunteers.... 

In this extended summary, our aim is analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data by independent component analysis (ICA) in order to find regions of brain which were activated by neural activity in human brain. We employ the minimum description length (MDL) criterion to reduce the dimension of the data and estimate the number of components, which makes ICA work more efficiently. We also use a simple oscillating index method to select automatically the components of interest. MDL and oscillating index criteria have not already been used in applying ICA for analyzing fMRI data. In order to investigate the advantage of using MDL and oscillating index, we perform some experiments... 

Background and objective Registration is a critical step in group analysis of diffusion weighted images (DWI). Image registration is also necessary for construction of white matter atlases that can be used to identify white matter changes. A challenge in the registration of DWI is that the orientation of the fiber bundles should be considered in the process, making their registration more challenging than that of the scalar images. Most of the current registration methods use a model of diffusion profile, limiting the method to the used model. Methods We propose a model-independent method for DWI registration. The proposed method uses a multi-level free-form deformation (FFD), a sparse... 

An active noise cancellation method is proposed for superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID)-based magnetocardiography systems working out of magnetically shielded rooms. Using YBCO high-Tc rf-SQUID magnetometers as magnetic field sensors, an active shielding system was implemented based on this method. This method incorporates two different shielding frequency regimes of operation simultaneously. This is because the unwanted background magnetic field signals range from very low frequencies up to high frequencies with a wide range of amplitudes at the upper and lower frequency spectra. Therefore, the shielding system is designed in a bistage configuration, and each stage covers... 

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is currently ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and recent estimates indicate that the disorder may rank third, just behind heart disease and cancer, as a cause of death for older people. Clearly, predicting this disease in the early stages and preventing it from progressing is of great importance. The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) requires a variety of medical tests, which leads to huge amounts of multivariate heterogeneous data. It can be difficult and exhausting to manually compare, visualize, and analyze this data due to the heterogeneous nature of medical tests, therefore, an efficient approach for accurate prediction of the... 

Diffusion weighted imaging is a non-invasive method for investigation of brain fiber bundles. In diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), the diffusion of water molecules is assumed Gaussian, therefore, it can just show a single fiber direction in a voxel. To overcome this limitation, a number of high angular resolution diffusion imaging methods have been proposed. One of these techniques is Q-ball imaging. Using this method, we can extract orientation distribution function (ODF) that shows the orientations of multiple fibers in a voxel. For extracting the fiber directions, the maxima of the ODFs are conventionally determined. However, the results of this approach are sensitive to noise. To improve... 

The combination of liposomes with magnetic nanoparticles, because of their strong effect on T2 relaxation can open new ways in the innovative cancer therapy and diagnosis. In order to design an intelligent contrast agent in MRI, we chose anti-HER2 nanobody the smallest fully functional antigen-binding fragments evolved from the variable domain, the VHH, of a camel heavy chain-only antibody. These targeted magnetoliposomes bind to the HER2 antigen which is highly expressed on breast and ovarian cancer cells so reducing the side effects as well as increasing image contrast and effectiveness. Cellular iron uptake analysis and in vitro MRI of HER2 positive cells incubated with targeted... 

An essential input to the musculoskeletal (MS) trunk models that estimate muscle and spine forces is kinematics of the thorax, pelvis, and lumbar vertebrae. While thorax and pelvis kinematics are usually measured via skin motion capture devices (with inherent errors on the proper identification of the underlying bony landmarks and the relative skin-sensor-bone movements), those of the intervening lumbar vertebrae are commonly approximated at fixed proportions based on the thorax-pelvis kinematics. This study proposes an image-based kinematics measurement approach to drive subject-specific (musculature, geometry, mass, and center of masses) MS models. Kinematics of the thorax, pelvis, and... 

Tissue segmentation in magnetic resonance brain scans is the most critical task in different aspects of brain analysis. Because manual segmentation of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images is a time-consuming and labor-intensive procedure, automatic image segmentation is widely used for this purpose. As Markov Random Field (MRF) model provides a powerful tool for segmentation of images with a high level of artifacts, it has been considered as a superior method. But because of the high computational cost of MRF, it is not appropriate for online processing. This article has proposed a novel method based on a proper combination of MRF model and watershed algorithm in order to alleviate... 

Single-ventricle anomaly is a hereditary heart disease that is characterized by anatomical malformations. The main consequence of this malformation is desaturated blood flow, which without proper treatment increases the risk of death. The classical treatment is based on a three-stage palliative procedure which should begin from the first few days of patient’s life. The final stage is known as Fontan procedure, in which inferior vena cava is directly connected to pulmonary arteries without going through the ventricle. This connection is called total cavopulmonary connection (TCPC). After surgery, the single ventricle supplies adequate and saturated systemic blood flow to the body; however,... 

Epidemiological studies have identified obesity asa possible risk factor for low back disorders. Biomechanical models can help test such hypothesis and shed light on the mechanism involved. A novel subject-specific musculoskeletal-modelling approach is introduced to estimate spinal loads during static activities in five healthy obese (BMI>30kg/m2) and five normal-weight (20