Matching Items (3)
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Description
Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) is a valuable technique for assessing the in vivo spatial profiles of metabolites like N-acetylaspartate (NAA), creatine, choline, and lactate. Changes in metabolite concentrations can help identify tissue heterogeneity, providing prognostic and diagnostic information to the clinician. The increased uptake of glucose by solid tumors

Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) is a valuable technique for assessing the in vivo spatial profiles of metabolites like N-acetylaspartate (NAA), creatine, choline, and lactate. Changes in metabolite concentrations can help identify tissue heterogeneity, providing prognostic and diagnostic information to the clinician. The increased uptake of glucose by solid tumors as compared to normal tissues and its conversion to lactate can be exploited for tumor diagnostics, anti-cancer therapy, and in the detection of metastasis. Lactate levels in cancer cells are suggestive of altered metabolism, tumor recurrence, and poor outcome. A dedicated technique like MRSI could contribute to an improved assessment of metabolic abnormalities in the clinical setting, and introduce the possibility of employing non-invasive lactate imaging as a powerful prognostic marker.

However, the long acquisition time in MRSI is a deterrent to its inclusion in clinical protocols due to associated costs, patient discomfort (especially in pediatric patients under anesthesia), and higher susceptibility to motion artifacts. Acceleration strategies like compressed sensing (CS) permit faithful reconstructions even when the k-space is undersampled well below the Nyquist limit. CS is apt for MRSI as spectroscopic data are inherently sparse in multiple dimensions of space and frequency in an appropriate transform domain, for e.g. the wavelet domain. The objective of this research was three-fold: firstly on the preclinical front, to prospectively speed-up spectrally-edited MRSI using CS for rapid mapping of lactate and capture associated changes in response to therapy. Secondly, to retrospectively evaluate CS-MRSI in pediatric patients scanned for various brain-related concerns. Thirdly, to implement prospective CS-MRSI acquisitions on a clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner for fast spectroscopic imaging studies. Both phantom and in vivo results demonstrated a reduction in the scan time by up to 80%, with the accelerated CS-MRSI reconstructions maintaining high spectral fidelity and statistically insignificant errors as compared to the fully sampled reference dataset. Optimization of CS parameters involved identifying an optimal sampling mask for CS-MRSI at each acceleration factor. It is envisioned that time-efficient MRSI realized with optimized CS acceleration would facilitate the clinical acceptance of routine MRSI exams for a quantitative mapping of important biomarkers.
ContributorsVidya Shankar, Rohini (Author) / Kodibagkar, Vikram D (Thesis advisor) / Pipe, James (Committee member) / Chang, John (Committee member) / Sadleir, Rosalind (Committee member) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Compressed sensing (CS) is a novel approach to collecting and analyzing data of all types. By exploiting prior knowledge of the compressibility of many naturally-occurring signals, specially designed sensors can dramatically undersample the data of interest and still achieve high performance. However, the generated data are pseudorandomly mixed and

Compressed sensing (CS) is a novel approach to collecting and analyzing data of all types. By exploiting prior knowledge of the compressibility of many naturally-occurring signals, specially designed sensors can dramatically undersample the data of interest and still achieve high performance. However, the generated data are pseudorandomly mixed and must be processed before use. In this work, a model of a single-pixel compressive video camera is used to explore the problems of performing inference based on these undersampled measurements. Three broad types of inference from CS measurements are considered: recovery of video frames, target tracking, and object classification/detection. Potential applications include automated surveillance, autonomous navigation, and medical imaging and diagnosis.



Recovery of CS video frames is far more complex than still images, which are known to be (approximately) sparse in a linear basis such as the discrete cosine transform. By combining sparsity of individual frames with an optical flow-based model of inter-frame dependence, the perceptual quality and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of reconstructed frames is improved. The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated for the cases of \textit{a priori} known image motion and unknown but constant image-wide motion.



Although video sequences can be reconstructed from CS measurements, the process is computationally costly. In autonomous systems, this reconstruction step is unnecessary if higher-level conclusions can be drawn directly from the CS data. A tracking algorithm is described and evaluated which can hold target vehicles at very high levels of compression where reconstruction of video frames fails. The algorithm performs tracking by detection using a particle filter with likelihood given by a maximum average correlation height (MACH) target template model.



Motivated by possible improvements over the MACH filter-based likelihood estimation of the tracking algorithm, the application of deep learning models to detection and classification of compressively sensed images is explored. In tests, a Deep Boltzmann Machine trained on CS measurements outperforms a naive reconstruct-first approach.



Taken together, progress in these three areas of CS inference has the potential to lower system cost and improve performance, opening up new applications of CS video cameras.
ContributorsBraun, Henry Carlton (Author) / Turaga, Pavan K (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas S (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
The power of science lies in its ability to infer and predict the

existence of objects from which no direct information can be obtained

experimentally or observationally. A well known example is to

ascertain the existence of black holes of various masses in different

parts of the universe from indirect evidence, such as X-ray

The power of science lies in its ability to infer and predict the

existence of objects from which no direct information can be obtained

experimentally or observationally. A well known example is to

ascertain the existence of black holes of various masses in different

parts of the universe from indirect evidence, such as X-ray emissions.

In the field of complex networks, the problem of detecting

hidden nodes can be stated, as follows. Consider a network whose

topology is completely unknown but whose nodes consist of two types:

one accessible and another inaccessible from the outside world. The

accessible nodes can be observed or monitored, and it is assumed that time

series are available from each node in this group. The inaccessible

nodes are shielded from the outside and they are essentially

``hidden.'' The question is, based solely on the

available time series from the accessible nodes, can the existence and

locations of the hidden nodes be inferred? A completely data-driven,

compressive-sensing based method is developed to address this issue by utilizing

complex weighted networks of nonlinear oscillators, evolutionary game

and geospatial networks.

Both microbes and multicellular organisms actively regulate their cell

fate determination to cope with changing environments or to ensure

proper development. Here, the synthetic biology approaches are used to

engineer bistable gene networks to demonstrate that stochastic and

permanent cell fate determination can be achieved through initializing

gene regulatory networks (GRNs) at the boundary between dynamic

attractors. This is experimentally realized by linking a synthetic GRN

to a natural output of galactose metabolism regulation in yeast.

Combining mathematical modeling and flow cytometry, the

engineered systems are shown to be bistable and that inherent gene expression

stochasticity does not induce spontaneous state transitioning at

steady state. By interfacing rationally designed synthetic

GRNs with background gene regulation mechanisms, this work

investigates intricate properties of networks that illuminate possible

regulatory mechanisms for cell differentiation and development that

can be initiated from points of instability.
ContributorsSu, Ri-Qi (Author) / Lai, Ying-Cheng (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Xiao (Thesis advisor) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015