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Objective: In medical imaging, it is often crucial to accurately assess and correct movement during image-guided therapy. Deformable image registration (DIR) consists in estimating the required spatial transformation to align a moving image with a fixed one. However, it is acknowledged that, boundary conditions applied to the solution are critical in preventing mis-registration. Despite the extensive research on registration techniques, relatively few have addressed the issue of boundary conditions in the context of medical DIR. Our aim is a step towards customizing boundary conditions to suit the diverse registration tasks at hand. Approach: We propose a generic, locally adaptive, Robin-type condition enabling to balance between Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, depending on incoming/outgoing flow fields on the image boundaries. The proposed framework is entirely automatized through the determination of a reduced set of hyperparameters optimized via energy minimization. Main results: The proposed approach was tested on a mono-modal CT thorax registration task and an abdominal CT to MRI registration task. For the first task, we observed a relative improvement in terms of target registration error of up to 12% (mean 4%), compared to homogeneous Dirichlet and homogeneous Neumann. For the second task, the automatic framework provides results closed to the best achievable. Significance: This study underscores the importance of tailoring the registration problem at the image boundaries. In this research, we introduce a novel method to adapt the boundary conditions on a voxel-by-voxel basis, yielding optimized results in two distinct tasks: mono-modal CT thorax registration and abdominal CT to MRI registration. The proposed framework enables optimized boundary conditions in image registration without any a priori assumptions regarding the images or the motion., Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

In this paper, we describe the magnetic potential in the vicinity of a corner of a conducting body embedded in a dielectric medium in a bidimensional setting. We make explicit the corner asymptotic expansion for this potential as the distance to the corner goes to zero. This expansion involves singular functions and singular coefficients. We introduce a method for the calculation of the singular functions near the corner and we provide two methods to compute the singular coefficients: the method of moments and the method of quasi-dual singular functions. Estimates for the convergence of both approximate methods are proven. We eventually illustrate the theoretical results with finite element computations. The specific non-standard feature of this problem lies in the structure of its singular functions: They have the form of series whose first terms are harmonic polynomials and further terms are genuine non-smooth functions generated by the piecewise constant zeroth order term of the operator.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic behavior of a biphase tumor fluid flow derived by 2-scale homogenisation techniques in recent works. This biphase fluid flow model accounts for the capillary wall permeability, and the interstitial avascular phase, both being mixed in the limit homogenised problem. When the vessel walls become more permeable, we show that the biphase fluid flow exhibits a boundary layer that makes the computation of the full problem costly and unstable. In the limit, both capillary and interstitial pressures coincide except in the vicinity of the boundary where different boundary conditions are applied. Thanks to a rigorous asymptotic analysis, we prove that the solution to the full problem can be approached at any order of approximation by a monophasic model with appropriate boundary conditions on the tumor boundary and appropriate correcting terms near the boundary are given. Numerical simulations in spherical geometry illustrate the theoretical results.

Various multi-modal imaging sensors are currently involved at different steps of an interventional therapeutic work-flow. Cone beam computed tomography (CBCT), computed tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance (MR) images thereby provides complementary functional and/or structural information of the targeted region and organs at risk. Merging this information relies on a correct spatial alignment of the observed anatomy between the acquired images. This can be achieved by the means of multi-modal deformable image registration (DIR), demonstrated to be capable of estimating dense and elastic deformations between images acquired by multiple imaging devices. However, due to the typically different field-of-view (FOV) sampled across the various imaging modalities, such algorithms may severely fail in finding a satisfactory solution. In the current study we propose a new fast method to align the FOV in multi-modal 3D medical images. To this end, a patch-based approach is introduced and combined with a state-of-the-art multi-modal image similarity metric in order to cope with multi-modal medical images. The occurrence of estimated patch shifts is computed for each spatial direction and the shift value with maximum occurrence is selected and used to adjust the image field-of-view. We show that a regional registration approach using voxel patches provides a good structural compromise between the voxel-wise and "global shifts" approaches. The method was thereby beneficial for CT to CBCT and MRI to CBCT registration tasks, especially when highly different image FOVs are involved. Besides, the benefit of the method for CT to CBCT and MRI to CBCT image registration is analyzed, including the impact of artifacts generated by percutaneous needle insertions. Additionally, the computational needs are demonstrated to be compatible with clinical constraints in the practical case of on-line procedures., Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures

The definition of an innovative therapeutic protocol requires the fine tuning of all the involved operations in order to maximize the efficiency. In some cases, the price of the experiments, or their duration, represents a great obstacle and the full potential of the protocol risks to be reduced or even hidden by a non-optimal application. The implementation of a numerical model of the protocol may represent the solution, allowing a systematic exploration of all the different alternatives, shedding the light on the most promising combination and also identifying the key elements/parameters. In this paper, the injection of a plasmid, preceded by a hyaluronidase injection, is simulated through a mathematical model. Some key elements of the administration protocol are identified by means of a mathematical optimization procedure, maximizing the efficacy of the therapy. As a side effect of the extensive investigation, robust solutions able to reduce the effects of human errors in the administration are also obtained.

We introduce a numerical framework that enables unprecedented direct numerical studies of the electropermeabilization effects of a cell aggregate at the meso-scale. Our simulations qualitatively replicate the shadowing effect observed in experiments and reproduce the time evolution of the impedance of the cell sample in agreement with the trends observed in experiments. This approach sets the scene for performing homogenization studies for understanding the effect of tissue environment on the efficiency of electropermeabilization. We employ a forest of Octree grids along with a Voronoi mesh in a parallel environment that exhibits excellent scalability. We exploit the electric interactions between the cells through a nonlinear phenomenological model that is generalized to account for the permeability of the cell membranes. We use the Voronoi Interface Method (VIM) to accurately capture the sharp jump in the electric potential on the cell boundaries. The case study simulation covers a volume of $(1\ mm)^3$ with more than $27,000$ well-resolved cells with a heterogeneous mix of morphologies that are randomly distributed throughout a spheroid region., Comment: 23 pages, 19 figures, submitted to Journal of Computational Physics

Consider an ambient medium and a heterogeneous entity composed of a bidimensional material surrounded by a thin membrane. The electromagnetic constants of these materials are different. By analogy with biological cells, we call this entity a cell. We study the asymptotic behavior of the electric field in the transverse magnetic (TM) mode, when the thickness of the membrane tends to zero. The membrane is of thickness of hf(s), with s a curvilinear coordinate. We provide a rigorous derivation of the first two terms of the asymptotic expansion for h tending to zero. In the membrane, these terms are given explicitly in local coordinates in terms of the boundary data and of the function f, while outside the membrane they are the solutions of a scalar Helmholtz equation with appropriate boundary and transmissions conditions given explicitly in terms of the boundary data and of the above function f. We prove that the remainder terms are of order O(h3/2). In addition, if the complex dielectric permittivity in the membrane, denoted by z_m, tends to zero faster than h, we give the difference between the exact solution and the above asymptotic with z_m = 0; it is of order O(h^{3/2}+|z_m|)., Comment: 26 pages. Submitted

We study the behavior of steady state voltage potentials in two kinds of bidimensional media composed of material of complex permittivity equal to 1 (respectively $\alpha$) surrounded by a thin membrane of thickness $h$ and of complex permittivity $\alpha$ (respectively 1). We provide in both cases a rigorous derivation of the asymptotic expansion of steady state voltage potentials at any order as $h$ tends to zero, when Neumann boundary condition is imposed on the exterior boundary of the thin layer. Our complex parameter $\alpha$ is bounded but may be very small compared to 1, hence our results describe the asymptotics of steady state voltage potentials in all heterogeneous and highly heterogeneous media with thin layer. The terms of the potential in the membrane are given explicitly in local coordinates in terms of the boundary data and of the curvature of the domain, while these of the inner potential are the solutions to the so-called dielectric formulation with appropriate boundary conditions. The error estimates are given explicitly in terms of $h$ and $\alpha$ with appropriate Sobolev norm of the boundary data. We show that the two situations described above lead to completely different asymptotic behaviors of the potentials., Comment: submitted. 28 pages