Substantiating the Use of Ultrasound Tissue Characterization in the Analysis of Tendon Structure: A Systematic Review.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the role of ultrasound tissue characterization (UTC) in predicting, diagnosing, and monitoring tendon structure and/or tendinopathy. In addition, this study aims to provide recommendations for standardized methodology of UTC administration and analysis. DATA SOURCE: The PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science databases were searched (up to September 2018). All scientific literature concerning the use of UTC in assessing tendons was collected. The initial search resulted in a total of 1972 hits, and after screening by eligibility criteria, 27 articles were included. RESULTS: In total, 18 investigating the Achilles tendon, 5 the patellar tendon, and 4 both Achilles and patellar tendons were included. The methods of UTC administration and analysis differed and were not uniform. The studies showed that the use of UTC to predict Achilles tendinopathy (AT) is inconclusive, but that a higher amount of tendon disorganization increases the risk of developing patellar tendinopathy (PT). In terms of diagnosis, UTC might provide additional information in AT cases. In addition, promising results were found for the use of UTC in both AT and PT in monitoring the effect of load or treatment on tendon structure. CONCLUSION: More research regarding the use of UTC in predicting tendon pathology is required. Ultrasound tissue characterization seems useful as an adjunct diagnostic modality because it can be used to differentiate symptomatic from asymptomatic tendons. In addition, UTC is a promising device to be used to monitor changes in tendon structure in response to load or treatment. Moreover, we provide recommendations of a standardized protocol concerning the methods of UTC measurement and analysis.

Coronary angiogram video compression adapted to medical imaging applications.

H.264/AVC coder has proven to use the most advanced video compression, but, at the cost of high computational complexity. On the other hand, analysis of coronary x-ray images reveals large areas containing no diagnostically important information. In this paper, we propose to exploit the energy characteristics in slice equal size regions to determine the active zones in coronary x-ray sequences to be encoded as normal using the H.264 coding system. The other regions, are compressed using conventional low complex approaches. Experimental results have shown that this procedure reduces the coder computing time of about 20% while attaining the same compression performance. A clinical subjective assessment by three expert physicians in interventional cardiology leads to a compression ratio of about 30:1 which insures both a diagnosis adequacy and a sufficient compression in regards to storage and transmission requirements.

A novel scheme for joint multi-channel ECG-ultrasound image compression.

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to compress jointly a Multi-Channel Electrocardiogram (MCE) and an ultrasound image. We will show that this technique allows better performances, in terms of compression ratio (CR) compared to coding separately both modalities. In this approach, scaled ECG samples are inserted within the high frequencies of the ultrasound image after its decomposition on wavelet basis. The new standard JPEG2000 is then applied on the packed data for both coding and decoding purpose. Finally, the reconstruction quality is evaluated using the PSNR (Peak Signal Noise Ratio) and the PRD (Percent Root Mean Square Difference), respectively for both the ultrasound image and the ECG signals.