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In the past 20 years, a wide range of complex fluoroscopically guided procedures have shown considerable growth. Biologic effects of the exposure (radiation induced burn, cancer) lead to reduce the dose during the intervention, for the safety of patients and medical staff. However, when the dose is reduced, image quality decreases, with a high level of noise and a very low contrast. Efficient restoration and denoising algorithms should overcome this drawback. We propose a spatio-temporal filter operating in a multi-scales space. This filter relies on a first order, motion compensated, recursive temporal denoising. Temporal high frequency content is first detected and then matched over time to allow for a strong denoising in the temporal axis. We study this filter in the curvelet domain and in the dual-tree complex wavelet domain, and compare those results to state of the art methods. Quantitative and qualitative analysis on both synthetic and real fluoroscopic sequences demonstrate that the proposed filter allows a great dose reduction.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is being evaluated as a pre-selection tool to categorize and localize populations of microbial colonies directly onto their culture medium, in order to facilitate the microbiology workflow downstream the incubation step. The categorization criteria were here limited to the diffuse radiance spectra acquired mostly in the visible region between 400 and 900 nm. Although the diffuse radiance signal is much broader than the one acquired using vibrational techniques such as Raman and IR and limited to chromophores absorbing in the visible region, it can be acquired very quickly allowing to perform hyperspectral imaging of large objects (i.e. Petri dishes) with throughputs that are compatible with the needs of a clinical laboratory workflow. Moreover, additional cost reduction could possibly be achieved using application-specific multispectral systems. Furthermore, recent research has shown that good power of discrimination, at the species level, could be achieved at least for a low level of species. In our work, we test different culture media, with and without a strong light absorption in the visible region, and report categorization results obtained when selecting end-member spectra according to a multi-parametric study (colonies, agar type). Results of categorization (e.g. at the species level) are presented using two types of supervised-categorization algorithms providing that they deliver subpixel fractional abundance information (Linear Spectral Unmixing type) or not such as Spectral Angle Mapping (SAM) and Euclidian Distance (ED) type. Interestingly the performance between the two classes of algorithms is dramatically different, a trend which is not always observed. An interpretation is proposed on the basis of the agar interference and the spectral purity of end-member spectra.

International audience; —Image guided interventions have seen growing interest in recent years. The use of X-rays for the procedure impels limiting the dose over time. Image sequences obtained thereby exhibit high levels of noise and very low contrasts. Hence, the development of efficient methods to enable optimal visualization of these sequences is crucial. We propose an original denoising method based on the curvelet transform. First, we apply a recursive temporal filter to the curvelet coefficients. As some residual noise remains, a spatial filtering is performed in the second step, which uses a magnitude-based classification and a contextual comparison of curvelet coefficients. This procedure allows to denoise the sequence while preserving low-contrasted structures, but does not improve their contrast. Finally, a third step is carried out to enhance the features of interest. For this, we propose a line enhancement technique in the curvelet domain. Indeed, thin structures are sparsely represented in that domain, allowing a fast and efficient detection. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations performed on synthetic and real low-dose sequences demonstrate that the proposed method enables a 50% dose reduction.

International audience; We propose an image denoising method which takes curvelet domain inter-scale, inter-location and inter-orientation dependencies into account in a maximum a posteriori labeling of the curvelet coefficients of a noisy image. The rationale is that generalized neighborhoods of curvelet coefficients contain more reliable information on the true image than individual coefficients. Based on the labeling of coefficients and their magnitudes, a smooth thresholding functional produces denoised coefficients from which the denoised image is reconstructed. We also outline a faster approach to labeling and thresholding, relying on contextual comparisons of coefficients. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on natural and X-ray images show that our method outperforms related multiscale approaches and compares favorably to the state-of-art BM3D method on X-ray data while executing faster.

A new method based on a multiresolution approach for solving the ill-posed problem of brain electrical activity reconstruction from electroencephaloram (EEG)/magnetoencephalogram (MEG) signals is proposed in a distributed source model. At each step of the algorithm, a regularized solution to the inverse problem is used to constrain the source space on the cortical surface to be scanned at higher spatial resolution. We present the iterative procedure together with an extension of the ST-maximum a posteriori method [1] that integrates spatial and temporal a priori information in an estimator of the brain electrical activity. Results from EEG in a phantom head experiment with a real human skull and from real MEG data on a healthy human subject are presented. The performances of the multiresolution method combined with a nonquadratic estimator are compared with commonly used dipolar methods, and to minimum-norm method with and without multiresolution. In all cases, the proposed approach proved to be more efficient both in terms of computational load and result quality, for the identification of sparse focal patterns of cortical current density, than the fixed scale imaging approach.

X-ray exposure during image guided interventions can be important for the patient as well as for the medical staff. Therefore dose reduction is a major concern. Nevertheless, decreasing the dose per image affects significantly the image quality. As a matter of fact, this tends to increase the noise and reduce the contrast. Hence, we propose a new and efficient method to reduce the noise in low dose fluoroscopic sequences. Many studies in that domain have been proposed implementing either multi-scale approaches using wavelet with its derivatives or using filters in the direct space. Our work is based on a spatio-temporal denoising filter using the curvelet transform. Indeed, this sparse transform represents well smooth images with edges and can be applied to fluoroscopic images in order to achieve robust denoising performances. Therefore, we propose to combine a temporal recursive filter with a spatial curvelet filter. Our work is focused on the use of the statistical dependencies between the curvelet coefficients in order to optimize the threshold function. Determining the correlation among coefficients allows to detect which coefficients represent the relevant signal. Thus, our method allows to diminish or even to erase curvelet-like artefacts. The performances and robustness of the proposed method are assessed both on synthetic and real low dose sequences (ie: 20 nGy/frame).

The real time recovery of the projection geometry is a fundamental issue in interventional navigation applications (e.g. guide wire reconstruction, medical augmented reality). In most works, the intrinsic parameters are supposed to be constant and the extrinsic parameters (C-arm motion) are deduced either from the orientation sensors of the C-arm or from other additional sensors (eg. optical and/or electro-magnetic sensors). However, due to the weight of the X-ray tube and the C-arm, the system is undergoing deformations which induce variations of the intrinsic parameters as a function of the C-arm orientation. In our approach, we propose to measure the effects of the mechanical deformations onto the intrinsic parameters in a calibration procedure. Robust calibration methods exist (the gold standard is the multi-image calibration ) but they are time consuming and too tedious to set up in a clinical context. For these reasons, we developed an original and easy to use method, based on a planar calibration target, which aims at measuring with a high level of accuracy the variation of the intrinsic parameters on a vascular C-arm. The precision of the planar-based method was evaluated by the mean of error propagation using techniques described in. 8 It appeared that the precision of the intrinsic parameters are comparable to the one obtained from the multi-image calibration method. The planar-based method was also successfully used to assess to behavior of the C-arm with respect to the C-arm orientations. Results showed a clear variation of the principal point when the LAO/RAO orientation was changed. In contrast, the intrinsic parameters do not change during a cranio-caudal C-arm motion.

International audience; This paper deals with the modeling of a vascular C-arm to generate 3D augmented fuoroscopic images in an interventional radiology context. A methodology based on the use of a multi-image calibration is proposed to assess the physical behavior of the C-arm. From the knowledge of the main characteristics of the C-arm, realistic models of the acquisition geometry are proposed. Their accuracy was evaluated and experiments showed that the C-arm geometry can be predicted with a mean 2D reprojection error of 0.5 mm. The interest of 3D augmented uoroscopy is also assessed on a clinical case.