Joao Miguel Sanches – författare

Diagnostic and Therapeutic Ultrasound has recently taken an explosive growth for better safer, economic, mobile and high quality healthcare.  This technology is very appealing for medical applications because it is non-ionizing, non-invasive and it is available in most of the medical and clinical facilities. Its low cost, when compared with other medical image modalities, makes it one of the preferred tools for medical monitoring, follow-up and diagnosis. Besides the traditional fields of Cardiology and Obstetrics, where it is extensively used for long time, it has became also very useful in the diagnosis of diseases of the prostate, liver and coronaries and carotids atherosclerosis. 

However, Ultrasound images present poor quality, very low signal to noise ratio and a lot of artifacts.  The extraction of useful information from Ultrasound data for diagnosis is a challenge task that makes this medical image modality a very active field of research. The difficulties are being overcome and novel and advanced methods are being proposed for detection, characterization and segmentation of abnormalities in several organs.  In fact, Ultrasound application range is vast, covering almost all organs of the human body, including the brain where Tran-cranial Doppler Ultrasound is very important to assess the brain vasculature.  

This book presents some of the recent advances in Ultrasound imaging technology covering several organs and techniques in a Biomedical Engineering (BME) perspective. The focus of the book is in the algorithms, methodologies and systems developed by multidisciplinary research teams of engineers and physicians for Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) purposes.

Cardiovascular and Cancer, the most common life-threatening diseases in western countries, are two of the most important topics focused in the book. However, other advanced issues are also presented such as Intravascular Ultrasound, 3D US and Ultrasound in Computer-AidedSurgery (CAS).  Some chapters are direct contributions from medical research groups where Ultrasound has also received great attention in the last decade. By this, new techniques based on Ultrasound were introduced in the clinical practice for diagnosis and therapeutics, mainly in hospital facilities.

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the world, resulting mostly from the sudden ruptures of atherosclerosis carotid plaques. Understanding why and how plaque develops and ruptures requires a multi-disciplinary approach such as radiology, biomedical engineering, medical physics, software engineering, hardware engineering, pathological and histological imaging. Multi-Modality Atherosclerosis Imaging, Diagnosis and Treatment presents a new dimension of understanding Atherosclerosis in 2D and 3D. This book presents work on plaque stress analysis in order to provide a general framework of computational modeling with atherosclerosis plaques. New algorithms based on 3D and 4D Ultrasound are presented to assess the atherosclerotic disease as well as very recent advances in plaque multimodality image fusion analysis.

The goal of Multi-Modality Atherosclerosis Imaging, Diagnosis and Treatment is to fuse information obtained from different 3D medical image modalities, such as 3D US, CT and MRI, providing the medical doctor with some sort of augmented reality information about the atherosclerotic plaque in order to improve the accuracy of the diagnosis. Analysis of the plaque dynamics along the cardiac cycle is also a valuable indicator for plaque instability assessment and therefore for risk stratification. 4D Ultrasound, a sequence of 3D reconstructions of the region of interest along the time, can be used for this dynamic analysis. Multimodality Image Fusion is a very appealing approach because it puts together the best characteristics of each modality, such as, the high temporal resolution of US and the high spatial resolutions of MRI and CT.