Gabrielle Baxter & Mehran Azimbagirad - CMIC/WEISS Joint Seminar Series

Speaker: Gabrielle Baxter

Title:  Functional magnetic resonance imaging of breast cancer

Abstract: 

Functional MRI can provide in vivo biomarkers that can facilitate the differential diagnosis of breast cancer and assessment of response to therapy. Non-invasive MRI techniques such as diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) can provide useful information about tumour cellularity, however image quality is limited due to imaging acquisition methods. Advanced acquisition strategies (such as multiplexed sensitivity encoding, MUSE) can be used to overcome these limitations. Dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) can provide information about tumour vascularity and has been used in the prediction of pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, particularly through the use of radiomics and deep learning approaches.  

Speaker: Mehran Azimbagirad

Title:  A semi-automatic tool for thigh muscle segmentation

Abstract: 

In order to follow up volume changes of thigh muscles in either disorders or muscle therapy treatments, several segmentation methods have been introduced. Since the accuracy of such methods is crucial to assess muscle reconstruction, we    introduced a semi-automatic tool to segment thigh muscles with the required accuracy. The tool segments each muscle in three steps. First, a few slices are annotated for each muscle. Then, all of these annotated contours are automatically connected using spline interpolation in both transversal and longitudinal directions. Finally, using morphological and image processing techniques, each 3D muscle is reconstructed in order to further analyze their volumes. The accuracy and executing time of this method are compatible with the clinical requirements.

Chair: Joe Jacob