Mingyue Ding

University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz · Bio-medical Engineering

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT), as an emerging technology, can provide multiple quantitative parametric images of human tissue, such as sound speed and attenuation images, distinguishing it from conventional B-mode (reflection) ultrasound imaging. Full waveform inversion (FWI) is acknowledged as a technique with the greatest potential for re...

Many studies have been carried out on ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) for its ability to offer quantitative measurements of tissue sound speed. Full waveform inversion (FWI) is a technique for reconstructing high-resolution sound speed images by iteratively minimizing the difference between the observed ultrasound data and the synthetic data...

Semi-supervised segmentation is highly significant in 3D medical image segmentation. The typical solutions adopt a teacher-student dual-model architecture, and they constrain the two models’ decision consistency on the same segmentation task. However, the scarcity of medical samples can lower the diversity of tasks, reducing the effectiveness of co...

Full-aperture tomography (FAT) is the major image reconstruction method for a circular ring array (CRA)-based ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) system. The FAT technique requires transferring the reconstruction process from the temporal domain to the spatial domain, during which the imaging resolution of the USCT is degraded by the spatial-doma...

Multimodal medical image fusion (MMIF) is highly significant in such fields as disease diagnosis and treatment. The traditional MMIF methods are difficult to provide satisfactory fusion accuracy and robustness due to the influence of such possible human-crafted components as image transform and fusion strategies. Existing deep learning based fusion...

Multi‐modal brain image registration has been widely applied to functional localisation, neurosurgery and computational anatomy. The existing registration methods based on the dense deformation fields involve too many parameters, which is not conducive to the exploration of correct spatial correspondence between the float and reference images. Mean...

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) depends on the coherence characteristics of scattered light to reveal tissue morphology. Therefore, OCT images are inevitably corrupted by speckle noise. The non-local means (NLM) method is a popular method for OCT image despeckling. However, the existing NLM algorithm cannot preserve image details well or deliver...

In the field of disease diagnosis where only a small dataset of medical images may be accessible, the light-weight convolutional neural network (CNN) has become popular because it can help to avoid the over-fitting problem and improve computational efficiency. However, the feature extraction capability of the light-weight CNN is inferior to that of...

Vessel wall volume (VWV) is a 3-D ultrasound measurement for the assessment of therapy in patients with carotid atherosclerosis. Deep learning can be used to segment the media-adventitia boundary (MAB) and lumen-intima boundary (LIB) and to quantify VWV automatically; however, it typically requires large training data sets with expert manual segmen...

In the proposed network, the features were first extracted from the gonioscopically obtained anterior segment photographs using the densely-connected high-resolution network. Then the useful information is further strengthened using the hybrid attention module to improve the classification accuracy. Between October 30, 2020, and January 30, 2021, a...

Multi-modal medical image fusion (MMIF) has found wide application in the field of disease diagnosis and surgical guidance. Despite the popularity of deep learning (DL)-based fusion methods, these DL algorithms cannot provide satisfactory fusion performance due to the difficulty in capturing the local information and the long-range dependencies eff...

This paper has proposed the two-stage generative adversarial nets (GAN) based multi-modal brain image registration method. The first stage uses the GAN to indirectly recover image deformation and the second stage employs the GAN to directly estimate the registered image. At the first stage, the GAN uses structural representations of reference and f...

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) has been developed for breast tumor screening. The sound-speed modal of USCT can provide quantitative sound-speed values to help tumor diagnosis. Time-of-flight (TOF) is the critical input in sound-speed reconstruction. However, we found that the missing data problem in the detected TOF causes artifacts on the...

Atherosclerotic carotid plaques have been shown to be closely associated with the risk of stroke. Since patients with symptomatic carotid plaques have a greater risk for stroke, stroke risk stratification based on the classification of carotid plaques into symptomatic or asymptomatic types is crucial in diagnosis, treatment planning, and medical tr...

The speckle noise is considered one of the main causes of degradation in ultrasound image quality. Many despeckling filters have been proposed, which are always making a trade-off between noise suppression and loss of information. A class of despeckling methods based Non-Local Means (NLM) algorithm is known to efficiently preserve the edges and all...

Background: Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) is a promising technique for improving the detection of breast cancer. Image quality of USCT has a major impact on the breast cancer diagnosis. Objective: This paper investigates the combination of variational mode decomposition (VMD) and coherent factor method for USCT image quality enhancement....

2D/3D registration that achieves high accuracy and real-time computation is one of the enabling technologies for radiotherapy and image-guided surgeries. Recently, the Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) has been explored to significantly improve the accuracy and efficiency of 2D/3D registration. A pair of intraoperative 2-D x-ray images and syntheti...

Carotid plaque echogenicity in ultrasound images has been found to be closely correlated with the risk of stroke in atherosclerotic patients. The automatic and accurate classification of carotid plaque echogenicity is of great significance for clinically estimating the stability of carotid plaques and predicting cardiovascular events. Existing conv...

Increasing attention has been attracted to the research of ultrasound computed tomography (USCT). This article reports the design considerations and implementation details of a novel USCT research system named UltraLucid, which aims to provide a user-friendly platform for researchers to develop new algorithms and conduct clinical trials. The modula...

As the main cause of irreversible visual impairment, angle-closure glaucoma (ACG) can be detected with anterior segment optical coherence tomography (AS–OCT). The automatic classification of anterior chamber angles (ACA) into closed angle, narrowed angle and open angle in the AS–OCT images is highly significant for understanding glaucoma progressio...

Carotid ultrasound measurement of total plaque area (TPA) provides a method for quantifying carotid plaque burden and monitoring changes in carotid atherosclerosis in response to medical treatment. Plaque boundary segmentation is required to generate the TPA measurement; however, training of observers and manual delineation are time consuming. Thus...

Planar array design makes the tradeoff between the 3-D ultrasound image quality and the system complexity, based on the imaging metrics. -6dB mainlobe width (MW), mainlobe-to-sidelobe energy ratio (MSR), peak sidelobe level (PSL), and average sidelobe level (ASL) are the common imaging metrics for linear array design. MW is used for lateral resolut...

Various Monte Carlo techniques for random point generation over sets of interest are widely used in many areas of computational mathematics, optimization, data processing, etc. Whereas for regularly shaped sets such sampling is immediate to arrange, for nontrivial, implicitly specified domains these techniques are not easy to implement. We consider...

Measurement of total-plaque-area (TPA) is important for determining long term risk for stroke and monitoring carotid plaque progression. Since delineation of carotid plaques is required, a deep learning method can provide automatic plaque segmentations and TPA measurements; however, it requires large datasets and manual annotations for training wit...

Non-rigid multi-modal medical image registration is a challenging task in the field of medical image processing and analysis because of the unpredictable complicated deformations and the nonfunctional intensity relation between images. The structural representation based registration (SRR) method can address these factors to some extent by transfor...

Many studies have been carried out on ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) for its potential application in breast imaging. The sound speed (SS) image modality in USCT can help doctors diagnose the breast cancer, as the tumor usually has a higher sound speed than normal tissues. Travel time is commonly used to reconstruct SS image. Raypath travel-...

Recently, the convolutional neural network (CNN) based real-time slice-to-volume registration methods show great potential in related clinical applications. Generally, these methods are mostly employed in monomodal scenarios because they essentially rely on image intensities. To extend this strategy in more general computer-aided surgery scenarios,...

Ultrasound imaging has become a routine means of diagnosing atherosclerosis. The classification of carotid ultrasound images and detection for the plaques automatically are critical for the diagnosis of atherosclerosis, which has important clinical significance for further analysis of plaque vulnerability and risk assessment of cardiovascular and c...

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) has important clinical application prospect in breast cancer screening and early diagnosis. In this paper, six kinds of coherence factor-like beamforming methods have been applied to improve the image quality for USCT, including coherence factor (CF), phase coherence factor (PCF), sign coherence factor (SCF), p...

Sound speed imaging is one modal of ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) which is helpful for early breast disease diagnosis. One of the most critical processes of sound speed reconstruction is time-of-flight picking. As each of the traditional time-of-flight picking methods has shortcomings for real data, in this study, a practical priorinformati...

Vessel-wall-volume (VWV) is an important three-dimensional ultrasound (3DUS) metric used in the assessment of carotid plaque burden and monitoring changes in carotid atherosclerosis in response to medical treatment. To generate the VWV measurement, we proposed an approach that combined a voxel-based fully convolution network (Voxel-FCN) and a conti...

Medical image classification plays an important role in disease diagnosis since it can provide important reference information for doctors. The supervised convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as DenseNet provide the versatile and effective method for medical image classification tasks, but they require large amounts of data with labels and inv...

In this paper we consider the problem of ultrasound tomography. Recently, an increased interest in ultrasound tomography has been caused by non-invasiveness of the method and increased detection accuracy (as compared to radiation tomography), and also ultrasound tomography does not put at risk human health. We study possibilities of detection of sp...

The non-rigid multi-modal three-dimensional (3D) medical image registration is highly challenging due to the difficulty in the construction of similarity measure and the solution of non-rigid transformation parameters. A novel structural representation based registration method is proposed to address these problems. Firstly, an improved modality in...

Purpose Quantification of carotid plaques has been shown to be important for assessing as well as monitoring the progression and regression of carotid atherosclerosis. Various metrics have been proposed and methods of measurements ranging from manual tracing to automated segmentations have also been investigated. Of those metrics, quantification of...

PURPOSE: Quantification of carotid plaques has been shown to be important for assessing as well as monitoring the progression and regression of carotid atherosclerosis. Various metrics have been proposed and methods of measurements ranging from manual tracing to automated segmentations have also been investigated. Of those metrics, quantification...

Brain slice-to-volume registration is an essential problem in numerous clinical applications; it is aimed at determining the rigid transformation parameters for locating intraoperative 2D slices in the preoperative 3D volume. This task has several challenges: (1) it has to be carried out in real-time; (2) it should not require manual intervention;...

Digital elevation model (DEM) super-resolution (SR) aims to increase the spatial resolution of a DEM through data processing, rather than using sensors with higher accuracy. Inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image SR, this study introduces the CNN into DEM SR. However, directly training a robust network for DEM SR h...

In linear array B-mode imaging, the zero-phase filtered delay multiply and sum beamforming (ZPF-DMAS) weighted by space-time smoothing coherence factor (StS-CF) has been proved to enhance the image contrast resolution than the traditional delay and sum method. However, the large number of virtual received signals may increase the computational cost...

Objectives To evaluate the effect of real‐time 3‐dimensional ultrasound (real‐time 3DUS) in guiding percutaneous nephrostomy (PCN). Materials and Methods A hydronephrosis model was devised by obstruction of ureters of 16 beagles divided equally into groups 1 and 2. In group 1, the PCN was guided using real‐time three‐dimensional ultrasound whereas...

Nonrigid multimodal image registration remains a challenging task in medical image processing and analysis. The structural representation (SR)-based registration methods have attracted much attention recently. However, the existing SR methods cannot provide satisfactory registration accuracy due to the utilization of hand-designed features for stru...

The learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithm aims at recovering a high-resolution (HR) image from low-resolution (LR) input. The quality of the HR output mainly depends on the strength of the learning algorithms. Observing that gradient boosting is powerful in dealing with learning problems, we propose a new SISR method based o...

In recent years, a number of studies on ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) have been carried out in early detection of breast cancer. In this paper, synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT) is used in USCT system to reconstruct three dimensional images. It can provide more accurate positioning in contrast to traditional B-mode images. Spatio...

Ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) such as SonoVue or Optison have been used widely in clinic for contrast-enhanced vascular imaging. However, microbubbles UCAs display limitations in tumor-targeted imaging due to the large sizes, nanoscaled UCAs has consequently attracted increasing attentions. In this work, we synthesized nanobubbles (NBs) by ultr...

For 3-D ultrasound imaging, the row-column addressing (RCA) with 2N connections for an N × N 2-D array makes the fabrication and interconnection simpler than the fully addressing with N² connections. However, RCA degrades the image quality because of defocusing in signal channel direction in the transmit event. To solve this problem, a split row-co...

Recent literatures have reported that the targeted nanoscale ultrasound contrast agents are becoming more and more important in medical application, like ultrasound imaging, detection of perfusion, drug delivery and molecular imaging and so on. In this study, we fabricated an uniform nanoscale bubbles (257 nm with the polydispersity index of 0.458)...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of virtual touch tissue imaging (VTI) based on ARFI elastography technique for differentiating malignant from benign thyroid nodules. One hundred pathologically proven thyroid nodules (80 benign, 20 malignant) in 76 participants were recruited in this study. The likelihood of malignan...

This paper presents a work of real-time 3-D image reconstruction for a 7.5-MHz, 24×24 row-column addressing array transducer. The transducer works with a predesigned transmit/receive module. After the raw data are captured by the NI PXIe data acquisition (DAQ) module, the following processing procedures are performed: delay and sum (DAS), base-line...

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation work on a pre-designed 3-D ultrasound imaging system. The system mainly consists of four parts, a 7.5MHz, 24×24 2-D array transducer, the transmit/receive circuit, power supply, data acquisition and real-time imaging module. The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication, whic...

Ultrasound image quality enhancement is a problem of considerable interest in medical imaging modality and an ongoing challenge to date. This paper investigates a method based on frequency-shift low-pass filtering (FSLF) and least mean square adaptive filtering (LMSAF) for ultrasound image quality enhancement. FSLF is used for processing the ultras...

In recent years, many research studies have been carried out on ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) for its application prospect in early diagnosis of breast cancer. This paper applies four kinds of coherence-factor-like beamforming methods to improve the image quality of synthetic aperture focusing method for USCT, including the coherence-factor...

Respiratory motion is a challenging factor for image acquisition, image-guided procedures and perfusion quantification using contrast-enhanced ultrasound in the abdominal and thoracic region. In order to reduce the influence of respiratory motion, respiratory correction methods were investigated. In this paper we propose a novel, cluster-based resp...

Ca(2+) ions play crucial roles in mediating physiological and pathophysiological processes, yet Ca(2+) dynamics local to the Ca(2+) source, either from influx via calcium permeable ion channels on plasmic membrane or release from internal Ca(2+) stores, is difficult to delineate. Large-conductance calcium-activated K(+) (BK-type) channels, abundant...

Images acquired during free breathing using contrast enhanced ultrasound hepatic perfusion imaging exhibits a periodic motion pattern. It needs to be compensated for if a further accurate quantification of the hepatic perfusion analysis is to be executed. To reduce the impact of respiratory motion, image-based breathing gating algorithm was used to...

This paper discusses a new topic, DEM super resolution, to improve the resolution of an original DEM based on its partial new measurements obtained with high resolution. A nonlocal algorithm is introduced to perform this task. The original DEM was first divided into overlapping patches, which were classified either as "test" or "learning" data depe...

Non-rigid multi-modal image registration plays an important role in medical image processing and analysis. Optimization is a key component of image registration. Mapped as a large-scale optimization problem, non-rigid image registration often requires global optimization methods because the functions defined by similarity metrics are generally non-...

A novel statistical deformable model based on quantum mechanics, Quantum Statistical Deformable Model (QSDM), was proposed to extract boundaries of the interested objects in an image. The proposed method based on quantum particle motion was inspired by the physical nature of quantum particle and the statistical property of the wave function in quan...

This paper intends to generate the approximate Voronoi diagram in the geodesic metric for some unbiased samples selected from original points. The mesh model of seeds is then constructed on basis of the Voronoi diagram. Rather than constructing the Voronoi diagram for all original points, the proposed strategy is to run around the obstacle that the...

Objectives: To investigate the acoustic radiation force impulse (ARFI) imaging characteristics of thyroid nodules. The ARFI technology consisted of virtual touch tissue imaging (VTI) and virtual touch tissue quantification (VTQ). Methods: One hundred thyroid nodules (80 benign, 20 malignant) in 76 patients were retrospectively analysed. The VTI ima...

A spatio-temporally smoothed coherence-factor method (StS-CF) was proposed in our previous work to improve the ultrasound image quality of coherence-factor (CF), which showed better side and grating lobe suppression ability than traditional delay-and-sum. Comparing with CF, StS-CF can provide images with increased overall image brightness, reduced...

Adaptive sampling for high dimensional manifold attracts much attention from related fields. The principal curvature based strategy is one of the popular methods. However, principal curvature estimation remains an open problem. Considering the relationship between geodesics and the principal curvatures of manifold, we transform the optimized sampli...

This paper proposes an effective approach to differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules using a hierarchical classification model based on the Virtual Touch tissue quantification (VTQ) value and anteroposterior/transverse diameter (A/T) ratio. One hundred twenty nodules (92 benign, 28 malignant) were analyzed using this approach by combining the qua...

Speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography (OCT) images plays an important role in facilitating further image analysis. Existing despeckling methods generally tend to provide insufficient speckle suppression or limited detail preservation especially at high speckle corruption. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel iterative no...

Speckle noise is an inherent nature of ultrasound images, which have negative effect on image interpretation and diagnostic tasks. In this paper, a nonlocal means method using weight refining for ultrasonic speckle reduction is proposed. Based on a signal-dependent speckle model, a novel similarity weight is derived by Bayesian framework. The weigh...

Classification of liver masses is important to early diagnosis of patients. In this paper, a diagnostic system of liver disease classification based on contrast enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) imaging is proposed. In the proposed system, the dynamic CEUS videos of hepatic perfusion are firstly retrieved. Secondly, time intensity curves (TICs) are extrac...

A novel adaptive switching morphological filter for removing fixed-value impulse noise is proposed. The proposed filter firstly identifies noise pixels using the two-stage morphological noise detector, in which the initial noise detection is used to identify the noise candidates based on the morphological gradients and the refined noise detection b...

Accurate reconstruction of the object from sparse-view sampling data is an appealing issue for ultrasound diffraction tomography (UDT). In this paper, we present a reconstruction method based on compressed sensing framework for sparse-view UDT. Due to the piecewise uniform characteristics of anatomy structures, the total variation is introduced int...

Traditional GVF snake model has enlarged capture range and improved the convergence capability for boundary concavities, but it cannot efficiently solve the convergence problem for an image with deep boundary concavities and high noise. In this paper, by integrating the region force derived from the region information of interested object in an ima...

Objective To determine the variability in the recognition of normal sperm and various sperm defects using the strict criteria recommended by the World Health Organization (5th edition, 2010). Design Sperm morphologic assessment by three experienced evaluators. Setting Image processing laboratory and reproduction research institute. Patient(s) Se...

In this paper, the relationship between image intensity and ultrasound contrast agent (UCA) concentration is investigated. Experiments are conducted in water bath using a silicon tube filled with UCA (SonoVue) at different concentrations (100μl/l to 6000μl/l) at around 37 °C to simulate the temperature in human body. The mean gray-scale intensity w...

Despeckling of ultrasound images, as a very active topic research in medical image processing, plays an important or even indispensable role in subsequent ultrasound image processing. The non-local total variation (NLTV) method has been widely applied to denoising images corrupted by Gaussian noise, but it cannot provide satisfactory restoration re...

This paper present a preliminary work on a pre-beamformed data acquisition ultrasound imaging system for a 3-MHz, 32×32 2-D array tranducer . The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication. This scheme provides a simple interconnection, consisting of one top and one bottom single-layer flex circuits. The designed system...

Real-time 3D ultrasonic imaging with 2D array is difficult to implement because of the challenge in fabricating and interconnecting the 2D transducer array with a large number of elements. Row-column addressing provides a simple manufacturing method with 2N connections rather than N2 for an N×N array. The top and bottom electrodes of the transducer...

Nanoscale bubbles (nanobubbles) have been reported to improve contrast in tumor-targeted ultrasound imaging due to the enhanced permeation and retention effects at tumor vascular leaks. In this work, a self-made nanobubble ultrasound contrast agent was preliminarily characterized and evaluated in-vitro and in-vivo. Fundamental properties such as mo...

function. Our results show that Mg 2þ and Ba 2þ binding to the high af-finity Ca 2þ binding site (Calcium Bowl) also induce structural rearrangements of the gating ring, although to a lesser extent than those observed after Ca 2þ binding. All the same, these rearrangements are not strictly coupled to the open-ing of the pore. Structural changes of...