Sharif Digital Repository

We explore the dictionary learning problem for sparse representation when the signals are dependent. In this paper, a first-order Markovian model is considered for dependency of the signals, that has many applications especially in medical signals. It is shown that the considered dependency among the signals can degrade the performance of the existing dictionary learning algorithms. Hence, we propose a method using the Maximum Log-likelihood Estimator (MLE) and the Expectation Minimization (EM) algorithm to learn the dictionary from the signals generated under the first-order Markovian model. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with the... 

Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) is a non-invasive method for investigating the brain white matter structure. It can be used to evaluate fiber bundles in the brain. However, clinical acquisitions are often low resolution. This paper proposes a method for improving the resolution using sparse representation. In this method a non-diffusion weighted image (bO) is utilized to learn the patches and then diffusion weighted images are reconstructed based on the trained dictionary. Our method is compared with bilinear, nearest neighbor and bicubic interpolation methods. The proposed method shows improvement in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural SIMilarity (SSIM)  

Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTMRI) is a non-invasive method for investigating the brain white matter structure. It can be used to evaluate fiber bundles in the brain but in the regions with crossing fibers, it fails. To resolve this problem, high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) with a large number of diffusion encoding directions is used and for reconstruction, the Q-ball method is applied. In this method, orientation distribution function (ODF) of fibers can be calculated. Mathematical models play a crucial role in the field of ODF. For instance, in registering Q-ball images for applications like group analysis or atlas construction, one needs to interpolate... 

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is a common method for the investigation of brain white matter. In this method, it is assumed that diffusion of water molecules is Gaussian and so, it fails in fiber crossings where this assumption does not hold. High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) allows more accurate investigation of microstructures of the brain white matter; it can present fiber crossing in each voxel. HARDI contains complex orientation information of the fibers. Therefore, registration of these images is more complicated than the scalar images. In this paper, we propose a HARDI registration algorithm based on the feature vectors that are extracted from the Orientation... 

In this paper, we compare registration results obtained using different diffusion maps extracted from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Fractional Anisotropy (FA) and Ellipsoidal Area Ratio (EAR) are two diffusion maps (indices) that may be used for image registration. First, we use FA maps to find deformation matrix and register diffusion weighted images. Then, we use EAR maps and finally we use both of FA and EAR maps to register diffusion weighted images. The difference between FA values before deformation and after registration using the FA alone or EAR alone has a median of 0.57 and using both of them has a median of 0.29. Therefore, the results of registration using both of the FA and... 

Background: Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) is a non-invasive method for investigating the brain white matter structure and can be used to evaluate fiber bundles. However, due to practical constraints, DWI data acquired in clinics are low resolution. New method: This paper proposes a method for interpolation of orientation distribution functions (ODFs). To this end, fuzzy clustering is applied to segment ODFs based on the principal diffusion directions (PDDs). Next, a cluster is modeled by a tensor so that an ODF is represented by a mixture of tensors. For interpolation, each tensor is rotated separately. Results: The method is applied on the synthetic and real DWI data of control and... 

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... 

Smoothing, while preserving edges, has always been a major challenge in image processing. In this paper, we propose a new approach that uses segmentation in order to avoid inter-region smoothing thus preserving the edges. It is common to smooth the image prior to region growing. The opposite procedure does not work properly in the presence of noise since region growing is very noise sensitive. To overcome this difficulty we adapted a robust region growing algorithm. Since region growing is very resource consuming, we do not perform it for every pixel. Instead, we divide the image into a number of overlapping blocks for which we carry out the segmentation. Then, we use the results for some of... 

Integrating high spatial resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and high temporal resolution of electroencephalogram (EEG) is promising in simultaneous EEG and fMRI analysis, especially for epileptic patients. The EEG recorded inside an MR scanner is interfered with MR artifacts. In this article, we propose new artifact reduction approaches and compare them with the conventional artifact reduction methods. Our proposed approaches are based on generalized eigenvalue decomposition (GEVD) and median filtering. The proposed methods are applied on experimental simultaneous EEG and fMRI recordings of an epileptic patient. The results show significant improvement over... 

Image registration is a basic task in medical image processing applications like group analysis and atlas construction. Similarity measure is a critical ingredient of image registration. Intensity distortion of medical images is not considered in most previous similarity measures. Therefore, in the presence of bias field distortions, they do not generate an acceptable registration. In this paper, we propose a sparse based similarity measure for mono-modal images that considers non-stationary intensity and spatially-varying distortions. The main idea behind this measure is that the aligned image is constructed by an analysis dictionary trained using the image patches. For this purpose, we use... 

Fingerprint is widely used in identification and verification systems. In this paper, we present a novel feature extraction method based on Gabor filter and Recursive Fisher Linear Discriminate (RFLD) algorithm, which is used for fingerprint identification. Our proposed method is assessed on images from the biolab database. Experimental results show that applying RFLD to a Gabor filter in four orientations, in comparison with Gabor filter and PCA transform, increases the identification accuracy from 85.2% to 95.2% by nearest cluster center point classifier with Leave-One-Out method. Also, it has shown that applying RFLD to a Gabor filter in four orientations, in comparison with Gabor filter... 

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...