Congratulation to Hassan for his 2nd journal publication.

Three-Dimension Coronary Artery Tree Curvature Confirmation

Hassan H. Khalil, Rahmita O.K. Rahmat, D. M. Zamrin, Ramlan Mahmod and Norwati Mustapha

Journal of Computer Science
DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2010.1518.1524
Volume 6, Issue 12
Pages 1524-1530

Problem statement: Three-Dimension (3D) reconstruction is one of the vital and robust tools that provide aid in many fields, especially medicine. This article is about 3D shape similarity and it presents a comparison approach between principal curvature methods of 3D output. Our approach follows the concept of using the gray scale value as the z dimension and the other approach is a standard one. A comparison of the curvature of the 3D outputs will be made between the standard approach and our proposed one to prove its correctness. We propose to use the standard deviation technique to compare the output features of the 3D coronary artery trees. We applied a standard approach of 3D shape similarity and compared the features with ours. The standard approach was published in 1998 as a study comparing certain 3D curvature measurement algorithms. Approach: Our approach consists of three major steps: (1) Apply the paraboloid fitting technique from the standard approach; (2) Apply the 3D reconstruction algorithm proposed in this research on the same data in step (1) and (3) Apply the Standard Deviation technique on both outputs from (1) and (2) and compare the outputs. Results: Experimental evaluation has been done on clinical raw data sets where the experimental results revealed that both outputs are totally matched. Conclusion: The match in the output refers to the correctness of the proposed 3D output and subsequently its coronary artery tree curvature as well.

Refer to : Khalil, H.H., R.O.K. Rahmat, D.M. Zamrin, R. Mahmod and N. Mustapha, 2010. Three-Dimension Coronary Artery Tree Curvature Confirmation. J. Comput. Sci., 6: 1524-1530. (DOI: 10.3844/jcssp.2010.1518.1524)

Farsad's sv committee progress meeting

 
 

On 23rd November, Prof. Dr Oteh came for Farsad's supervisory committee progress meeting.

Well done Farsad, for a tremendous progress!

Supervisory Committee Progress Meeting at IJN

Anas presenting her progress. Zaher silently watching and Fatin still updating her presentation

Dr Zamrin and Dr Suhaini listening attentively to Anas progress presentation and later to Fatin presentation.

Discussion with WC and friends.

6 November 2010, 10.30 am, Seminar Room Block C

Attendance : Haji Hasan, Dr. Zamrin, Dr Nasir, Rahmita, Lilly, Bie, Mr Tajul, WC and friends.

Decision :

• WC and friends will develop up to basic CICU modul,
• Next meeting with the group will be on 11th December 2010, 10 am,
• 2nd next meeting with the group will be on 8th January 2011, 10 am, which will be the final output presentation. 
• If the output is satisfying then we will continue to the next modul. 
• The output will be used for our next level of research, and hopefully our grant proposal will be approved. 

WC progress presentation.

Mr Tajul,WC and friends discussing their next strategy.

Prof. Haji Hasan with his thinking head.

Latest Output!

Zinah Alussi, Rahmita Wirza, D.M. Zamrin, Echocardiograph Imaging, The Influence of Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Echocardiograph Interpretation Informatics, released by LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (2010-10-29)-ISBN-13:978-3-8433-58788-1

Discussion with Mr Tajul

Friday, 29th October, 2. 30 pm, seminar room block A.
Mr Tajul presented the system that we outsourced to him.  This system was developed as required by Prof. Joanna so that the group can do analysing, data mining and information visualization.
We (A.P, Haji Hasan, A.P. Dr  Mohd Nasir, Dr Rahmita, Dr Lilly, Dr Rabiah, Dr Rohaya) satisfied with the presentation but few things need to consider:

• How to ask IDec to give us an IP so that we can do system testing with Prof. Joanna, 
• How to accelerate the progress of development for another system,
• Strategy of implementing data mining. 

New project!

Congratulation to Zinah!

Congratulation to Zinah for succesfully defending her MSc thesis with title "Influence Diagnostic Accuracy in Dynamic Echocardiograph by Combination of Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis". She was given 60 days to do modification. Congratulation!

Meeting with Prof. Dr. Joanna at PPUKM

We've met Prof. Dr. Joanna and discussed a new project, which related to Hyperhidrosis. From our desk research finding we acknowledge that Hyperhidrosis is a condition characterized by abnormally increase of perspiration in excess of required for regulation of body temperature. It can either be generalized or localized to specific parts of the body such as hands, feet, armpits and the groin area. Sweat gland removal or destruction is one surgical option available for axillary hyperhidrosis. There are multiple methods for sweat gland removal or destruction such as sweat gland suction, retrodermal curettage and axillary liposuction.  However the treatment that interest us is endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy (ETS), which cuts, burns, or clamps the thoracic ganglion on the main sympathetic chain that runs alongside the spine. It was claimed that ETS is generally considered a "safe", reproducible and effective procedure. This project intend to process related medical images (x-rays), automatically measures importance features and produce table of parameters that relevant to Asian. Puteri Suhaiza will supervise the PhD candidate that we tag along  with us in this meeting and co-supervise by Prof. Dr. Joanna and Prof. Dr. Mohd Ramzisham.

 

Thanks Prof. Dr. Joanna for a very fruitfully discussion.

Thank you Prof Dr Hamid!

This is the information we get from Wikipedia:
The aortic valve is one of the valves of the heart. It is normally tricuspid (with three leaflets), although in 1% of the population it is found to be congenitally bicuspid (two leaflets). It lies between the left ventricle and the aorta. During ventricular systole, pressure rises in the left ventricle. When the pressure in the left ventricle rises above the pressure in the aorta, the aortic valve opens, allowing blood to exit the left ventricle into the aorta. When ventricular systole ends, pressure in the left ventricle rapidly drops. When the pressure in the left ventricle decreases, the aortic pressure forces the aortic valve to close.

Aortic valve replacement means that a patient's aortic valve is replaced by a different valve. The aortic valve can be affected by a range of diseases and require aortic valve replacement. The valve can either become leaky or stuck partially shut. Aortic valve replacement currently requires open heart surgery. There are two basic types of artificial heart valve, mechanical valves and tissue valves. Tissue heart valves are usually made from animal tissues, either animal heart valve tissue or animal pericardial tissue. The tissue is treated to prevent rejection and to prevent calcification.There are alternatives to animal tissue valves. In some cases a human aortic valve can be implanted. These are called homografts. Homograft valves are donated by patients and recovered after the patient expires. The durability of homograft valves is probably the same for porcine tissue valves. Another procedure for aortic valve replacement is the Ross procedure or pulmonary autograft. The Ross procedure involves going to surgery to have the aortic valve removed and replacing it with the patient's own pulmonary valve. A pulmonary homograft (a pulmonary taken from a cadaver) or a valvular prosthesis is then used to replace the patient's own pulmonary valve.(Wikipedia)

But the information is not really help us. We need someone to explain to us in detail, especially the mechanism of the valve.

On 2nd of September 2010, we met Prof Dr Hamid (Anatomy Professor), who explained to us details theory of Aortic Valve.

We managed to record the brief explanation given by Prof. Dr.Abdul Hamid Bin Abdul Rashid @ Kyaw Myint, so that we can refresh our memory for each research step.



We need to explore more the valve leaflet. We managed to digitized the leaflet using Minolta 3D laser scanner. We need to explore techniques on how to digitize the whole implant.
 

Meeting with Mr Tajul and WC's team

28th August 2010, Saturday, 2.30 pm, Seminar Room A.
   
      Haji Hasan, Dr Zamrin, Bie and me meet with Mr Tajul, and WC's team to discuss strategy on how to develop the basic system. The two parties agree with Mr Tajul proposition. Hopefully with the existence of the basic system, research will progressive fast.  The progressive will be much faster if MOSTI approve our research budget proposition.

Automated Boundary Detection

Well done Faten! This is her preliminary output for her PhD work. It seems her Automated Boundary Detection output is better than commercial software. Her next step will be to validate and justify this finding. Her supervisor committee are Rahmita Wirza, Dr Suhaini Kadiman, Dr. Mohd Zamrin Dimon, Dr. Mohd Iqbal and Dr Lili Nurliyana Abdullah.

Poisson Surface.

Well done Hasan! He managed to deploy Michael Kazhdan et.al. work. He fit Poisson Surface onto his previous work which were processing, extruding, and COG computing of angiogram image. His next step will be scanning in u-v direction for sudden changes. It can be seen here grid points calculated from Poisson Surface and displayed using MeshLab.

2nd meeting with 4 graduate students

10.30 am, WC team and me have our 2nd meeting. I just brief them the system and asked each of them to sign the NDA. They will go and meet Dr. Zamrin and later will discuss their task with Mr Tajul.

Ramadhan Mubarak 1431H

Happy Ramadhan everybody...

1st meeting with 4 graduate students

Today, 7 August 2010, 12.30 pm.

Mr Tajul, Dr Rabiah, Chun Yee, Wei Chiet, Chin Yee, Mei Yee and me, discussing the post system development, code, scope and how to proceed with the task. We agree to meet again next Saturday.

PRPI 2010

Congratulation to Hasan and his team for winning gold medal in PRPI 2010.

Next step will enhance the 3D, fitting it with polynomial fitting, deploying the directive partial derivative and identify the sudden changes. At the same time, enhance the voice activation platform and database design to suit the main system.

At IT-Healthcare Exhibition

Can be seen here, Mrs Puteri Suhaiza, Mrs Rabiah Abdul Kadir, Mrs Lilly Suriani and Mrs Rahmita Wirza infront of Clinical Research Centre booth. We were interested with the One Stop Centre and would like to know what information that this centre can provide. Most probably our next visit will be this centre.

This is a poster in the CRC booth. Listed were academics' publication in highly impact factor journal.

CRC poster.

We were interested with OT management system even though not within our project's scope.

An Improved Seed Point Detection Algorithm for Centerline Tracing in Coronary Angiograms

We presents a new method to detect initial seed points for automatic tracing of the vessel center lines in coronary angiograms. Vessel tracing algorithms are known to be fast and efficient among several feature extraction methods. However, most of them suffer from incomplete results due to inappropriate trade-off between the completeness of seed point detection and computational efficiency. Imposing strict validation rules decreases the number of background traces, but results in more false negatives and more computation time. We show that using the geometrical properties of gradient vectors calculated at vessel boundary points as a validation criterion, improves the performance of the seed point detection algorithm. The results illustrate that the proposed method improves upon the prior method in both performance and computation time.continue-->

Quantitative Detection of Left Ventricular Wall Motion Abnormality by Two-Dimensional Echocardiography

Echocardiogram has become an important diagnostic tool in modern cardiology. Although this imaging modality is the most widely used to evaluate regional left ventricular function, it allows non-invasive real-time visualization of left ventricular motion. Evaluation of the left ventricular function based on subjective experience-dependent visual interpretation of dynamic images of echocardiograph. Unfortunately echocardiograph is notoriously difficult to interpret even for the best physicians where they could misdiagnose the heart disease. Hence there is a tremendous need for an automated technique that can provide objective diagnostic assistance, particularly to the less-experienced cardiologist.
In this study, the team address the task of building a computer aided diagnosis system that can detect LV motion abnormalities from echocardiograph. The team work based on the anatomical structure of the left ventricular wall in short axis echocardiograph and the team will use the wall thickening as a parameter to evaluate a profile for the regional myocardial function in normal conditions.  Continue -->

Trip to Singapore (4th June 2010)

A New Tracing Algorithm for Automatic Boundary Extraction from Coronary Cineangiograms

The need for reliable identification of vessel contours from X-ray image sequences within a limited computation time is still a challenge in medical image analysis. In the literature, only a few vessel boundary extraction methods are suitable to meet automatic and real-time constraints for capturing and processing coronary artery cineangiograms. Among many approaches, vessel tracing algorithms are known to be fast and robust for  practically detecting the vessel structures from live two- dimensional angiogram sequences. However, they often do not directly extract the boundary points and instead the locations of boundary points are achieved after identifying the correct position of center line points. This boundary detection scheme seems to be less efficient in speed demanding clinical applications. The team introduced a new algorithm for automatic tracing of vessel boundaries using an efficient estimation of local gradient vector. The results illustrate that the team method is a promising method for real-time vessel segmentation and linear feature extraction. Continue -->

Zeena's work

On 29th January 2010, 3 PhD students went to CathLab to check the procedure. There are few questions need answer. Among these questions are:

• the scaling factor for angiogram images,
• the technology of the C-arm X-ray,
• was the patient's bed being moved if the cardiologist need to zoom the view.

Meeting Dr Suhaini at IJN

This is our 3rd visit after introduced to Dr Suhaini by Dr Zamrin. We trying to understand the problem statements supplied by Dr Suhaini.