Morphological features of small vessels provide invaluable information regarding underlying tissue, especially in cancerous tumors. This paper introduces methods for obtaining quantitative morphological features from microvasculature images obtained by non-contrast ultrasound imaging.Those images suffer from the artifact that limit quantitative analysis of the vessel morphological features.In this paper we introduce processing steps to increase accuracy of the morphological assessment for quantitative vessel analysis in presence of these artifact. Specifically, artificats are reduced by additional filtering and vessel segments obtained by skeletonization of the regularized microvasculature images are further analyzed to satisfy additional constraints, such as diameter, and length of the vessel segments.Measurement of some morphological metrics, such as tortuosity, depends on preserving large vessel trunks that may be broken down into multiple branches. We propose two methods to address this problem. In the first method, small vessel segments are suppressed in the vessel filtering process via adjusting the size scale of the regularization. Hence, tortuosity of the large trunks can be more accurately estimated by preserving longer vessel segments. In the second approach, small connected vessel segments are removed by a combination of morphological erosion and dilation operations on the segmented vasculature images. These methods are tested on representative in vivo images of breast lesion microvasculature, and the outcomes are discussed. This paper provides a tool for quantification of microvasculature image from non-contrast ultrasound imaging may result in potential biomarkers for diagnosis of some diseases.
A nano abnormality detection scheme (NADS) in molecular nano-networks is studied. This is motivated by the fact that early detection of diseases such as cancer play a crucial role in their successful treatment. The proposed NADS is in fact a two-tier network of sensor nano-machines (SNMs) in the first tier and a data-gathering node (DGN) at the sink. The SNMs detect the presence of competitor cells (abnormality) by variations in input and/or parameters of a nano-communications channel (NCC). The noise of SNMs as their nature suggest is considered correlated in time and space and herein assumed additive Gaussian. In the second step, the SNMs transmit micro-scale messages over a noisy micro communications channel (MCC) to the DGN, where a decision is made upon fusing the received signals.We find an optimum design of detectors for each of the NADS tiers based on the end-to-end NADS performance. The detection performance of each SNM is analyzed by setting up a generalized likelihood ratio test. Next, taking into account the effect of the MCC, the overall performance of the NADS is analyzed in terms of probabilities of misdetection and false alarm. In addition, computationally efficient expressions to quantify the NADS performance is derived by providing respectively an approximation and an upper bound for the probabilities of misdetection and false alarm. This in turn enables formulating a design problem, where the optimized concentration of SNMs in a sample is obtained for a high probability of detection and a limited probability of false alarm. The results indicate that otherwise ignoring the spatial and temporal correlation of SNM noise in the analysis, leads to an NADS that noticeably underperforms in operations.
This paper studies the capacity of molecular communications in fluid media, where the information is encoded in the number of transmitted molecules in a time-slot (amplitude shift keying). The propagation of molecules is governed by random Brownian motion and the communication is in general subject to inter-symbol interference (ISI). We first consider the case where ISI is negligible and analyze the capacity and the capacity per unit cost of the resulting discrete memoryless molecular channel and the effect of possible practical constraints, such as limitations on peak and/or average number of transmitted molecules per transmission. In the case with a constrained peak molecular emission, we show that as the time-slot duration increases, the input distribution achieving the capacity per channel use transitions from binary inputs to a discrete uniform distribution. In this paper, we also analyze the impact of ISI.Crucially, we account for the correlation that ISI induces between channel output symbols. We derive an upper bound and two lower bounds on the capacity in this setting. Using the input distribution obtained by an extended Blahut-Arimoto algorithm, we maximize the lower bounds. Our results show that, over a wide range of parameter values, the bounds are close.
Vascular networks can provide invaluable information about tumor angiogenesis. Ultrafast Doppler imaging enables ultrasound to image microvessels by applying tissue clutter filtering methods on the spatio-temporal data obtained from plane-wave imaging. However, the resultant vessel images suffer from background noise that degrades image quality and restricts vessel visibilities. In this paper, we addressed microvessel visualization and the associated noise problem in the power Doppler images with the goal of achieving enhanced vessel-background separation. We proposed a combination of patch-based non-local mean filtering and top-hat morphological filtering to improve vessel outline and background noise suppression. We tested the proposed method on a flow phantom, as well as in vivo breast lesions, thyroid nodules, and pathologic liver from human subjects. The proposed non-local-based framework provided a remarkable gain of more than 15 dB, on average, in terms of contrast-to-noise and signal-to-noise ratios. In addition to improving visualization of microvessels, the proposed method provided high quality images suitable for microvessel morphology quantification that may be used for diagnostic applications.
A scheme for detection of abnormality in molecular nano-networks is proposed. This is motivated by the fact that early diagnosis, classification and detection of diseases such as cancer play a crucial role in their successful treatment. The proposed nano-abnormality detection scheme (NADS) comprises of a two-tier network of sensor nano-machines (SNMs) in the first tier and a data gathering node (DGN) at the sink. The SNMs detect the presence of competitor cells as abnormality that is captured by variations in parameters of a nano-communications channel. In the second step, the SNMs transmit micro-scale messages over a noisy micro communications channel (MCC) to the DGN, where a decision is made upon fusing the received signals. The detection performance of each SNM is analyzed by setting up a Neyman-Pearson test. Next, taking into account the effect of the MCC, the overall performance of the proposed NADS is quantified in terms of probabilities of misdetection and false alarm. A design problem is formulated, when the optimized concentration of SNMs in a sample is obtained for a high probability of detection and a limited probability of false alarm.
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