Biomedical

Metal artifacts in CT scans are a major problem for radiologists today. Whenever a patient has a metallic object in his body (dental fills, platinum bolts or knife wounds for instance), the CT image gets completely ruined, as seen in the image below. We suggest to use advanced signal processing tools, such as sparse representations, dictionary learning and others, in order to exploit the structure of the CT scans to...

Medical CT imaging is probably the most widely used imaging tool in-use today. In this project, we consider the problem of scanning from only a limited angle of projections (less than 180o). Successfully reconstructing from a limited projection angle would allow us to install small CT scanners in small clinics, and maybe even on-board ambulances. However, limited angle reconstruction is a tough mathematical problem, and we will attempt to solve...

Medical ultrasound is used for tissue visualization by radiating it with acoustic energy transmitted by an array of elements. Novel imaging method based on insonification with diverging improves image quality and acquisition time, however, it is limited by data transfer rates and severe computational load. In addition, modern imaging systems use single-carrier short pulses for transducer excitation, while the usage of more sophisticated signals can be beneficial in terms of...

Ultrasound tomography (UST) is an imaging technique that combines sonography with computed tomography (CT) methods to solve an inverse problem. It is well suited for inferring biomechanical properties of a volume of tissue from measurements made along a surface surrounding the tissue. One clinically relevant application is the detection of breast cancer. UST has been under development for more than 30 years, motivated by many potential advantages over x-ray CT...

Doppler ultrasound is a non-invasive and safe modality that is used for the estimation of blood velocities by transmitting high-frequency sound waves (ultrasound) and analyzing the signals reflected from circulating red blood cells. Doppler scans help diagnose many conditions, including: heart valve defects and congenital heart disease, artery occlusions and aneurysms.

Medical ultrasound is used for tissue visualization by radiating it with acoustic energy transmitted by an array of elements. Novel imaging method based on insonification with diverging improves image quality and acquisition time, however, it is limited by data transfer rates and severe computational load. Recently, a new array geometry have been introduced, which provides a novel way to perform array processing with much fewer physical sensors when the second-order...

Elastography is a medical imaging modality that maps the elastic properties of soft tissue. The main idea is that whether the tissue is hard or soft will give diagnostic information about the presence or status of disease. For example, elastography is used for detection and diagnosis of breast, thyroid and prostate cancers. Certain types of elastography are also used to investigate disease in the liver. Compressed sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique for efficiently...

Diagnostic sonography allows visualization of body tissues, by radiating them with acoustic energy pulses. As the pulse propagates, echoes are scattered by density and propagation-velocity perturbations in the tissue, and detected by the transducer elements. Averaging the detected signals, after their alignment with appropriate time-varying delays, allows localization of the scattering structures, while improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The latter process is referred to as beamforming. Standard beamforming is a generic process,...

Diabetes was recently declared as a worldwide epidemic by the National Health Organization, with hundreds of millions of patients worldwide, and many more in a pre-diabetic state. Diabetes patients need to monitor their blood glucose levels constantly, and are prone to high (hypercalcemia) and low (hypoglycemia) spikes for blood glucose fluctuations. One of the promising ways to measure glucose levels is with the Libre system, which attaches to the back...

Blood oxygenation level dependent Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (BOLD-MRI) is a data acquisition technique that tracks the changes in blood flow in task-related regions. Due to the low data acquisition fMRI sample rate, a relatively larger number of volumes should be acquired in order to receive a meaningful signal. One way to achieve this larger number of volumes is by increasing the scanning time, which, in children, can be very problematic...

This is a biomedical project for real time ECG analysis for acute pain detection. Analysis of the heart rhythm using the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit has achieved accurate pain detection in both healthy young adults and in patients under general anesthesia. The process was performed off line, using ECG recordings. This project involves signal processing, of real time ECG monitoring using advanced signal processing methods. This project after its initial phase will involve...

This is a biomedical project for real time fetal ECG analysis. The process of fetal ECG recording is usually complicated since the maternal ECG is of higher amplitude compared to the fetal one. The fetal ECG is contaminated by many sources of noise such as fetal respiration and movement. The initial objective was to identify the fetal ECG in pregnant women and successfully separate it from the maternal signal. This was achieved in 2018 and this year we...

Tissue Doppler ultrasound imaging (TDI) enables the estimation of cardiac function by transmitting streams of pulses in a certain direction and estimating the velocity of the tissue from the phase shifts of the returning echoes. In order to estimate the velocity of the tissue precisely and separate slow tissue movement from dominant clutter, a large number of pulses has to be transmitted in the same direction. TDI has two main...