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- Interpretation of medical images: end of subjectivity?Publication . Almeida, Ana; Vieira, Lina; Figueiredo, Sérgio; Rodrigues, José AlbertoIn medicine, images are often used in order to obtain a diagnosis. Among the innumerable images those from optical microscopy, such as the blood smears, and the computational ones such as renal scintigraphy. Blood smears allow identification and categorization of conditions that affect blood cells, as well as identification of microorganisms. An incorrect interpretation of images can have implications in the diagnosis and evaluation of therapeutic efficacy. Renal scintigraphy is an imaging method of Nuclear Medicine that allows the study of renal dimension and location, evaluation of the renal cortex, and the presence of renal cortical scarring as a consequence of irreversible kidney damage after a urinary infection. The importance in the analysis and interpretation of these studies is related with diagnosis and follow-up of renal pathologies, as well as to the therapeutic decision. However, it is known that there are currently some limitations in the detection of renal scars, which are caused by factors such as: physical, instrumental, and patient-related. The interpretation of either blood smears or renal scintigraphy is associated with training and expertise. These are allied to the subjectivity of the observer, being a limitation in the quality and reproducibility of the results.
- Interpretation of medical image: end of subjectivity?Publication . Almeida, Ana; Vieira, Lina; Figueiredo, Sérgio; Rodrigues, José AlbertoIn medicine, images are often used in order to obtain a diagnosis. Among the innumerable images those from optical microscopy, such as the blood smears, and the computational ones such as renal scintigraphy. Blood smears allow identification and categorization of conditions that affect blood cells, as well as identification of microorganisms. An incorrect interpretation of images can have implications in the diagnosis and evaluation of therapeutic efficacy. Renal scintigraphy is an imaging method of Nuclear Medicine that allows the study of renal dimension and location, evaluation of the renal cortex, and the presence of renal cortical scarring as a consequence of irreversible kidney damage after a urinary infection. The importance in the analysis and interpretation of these studies is related with diagnosis and follow-up of renal pathologies, as well as to the therapeutic decision. However, it is known that there are currently some limitations in the detection of renal scars, which are caused by factors such as: physical, instrumental, and patient-related. The interpretation of either blood smears or renal scintigraphy is associated with training and expertise. These are allied to the subjectivity of the observer, being a limitation in the quality and reproducibility of the results.
- Developments on finite element methods for medical image supported diagnosticsPublication . Almeida, Ana; Barbosa, Joaquim; Carvalho, André; Loja, Amélia; Portal, Ricardo; Rodrigues, José Alberto; Vieira, Lina OliveiraVariational image-processing models offer high-quality processing capabilities for imaging. They have been widely developed and used in the last two decades, enriching the fields of mathematics as well as information science. Mathematically, several tools are needed: energy optimization, regularization, partial differential equations, level set functions, and numerical algorithms. For this work we consider a second-order variational model for solving medical image problems. The aim is to obtain as far as possible fine features of the initial image and identify medical pathologies. The approach consists of constructing a regularized functional and to locally analyse the obtained solution. Some parameters selection is performed at the discrete level in the framework of the finite element method. We present several numerical simulations to test the efficiency of the proposed approach.