Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Development Of Fully Balanced Ssfp And Computer Vision Applications For Mri-Assisted Radiosurgery (Mars), Jeremiah Sanders

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. Brachytherapy is a highly effective treatment option for prostate cancer, and is the most cost-effective initial treatment among all other therapeutic options for low to intermediate risk patients of prostate cancer. In low-dose-rate (LDR) brachytherapy, verifying the location of the radioactive seeds within the prostate and in relation to critical normal structures after seed implantation is essential to ensuring positive treatment outcomes.

One current gap in knowledge is how to simultaneously image the prostate, surrounding anatomy, and radioactive seeds within the …

A Multimodal Approach To Investigate Brain Reorganization After Spinal Cord Injury Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging And Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, Keerthana Deepti Karunakaran

Dissertations

Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) results in structural and functional neurological changes at both the brain and the level of the spinal cord. Anatomical studies indicate decreased grey matter volume in sensorimotor and non-sensorimotor regions of the cortex following SCI; whereas, neurophysiological findings mostly report altered functional activity in the sensorimotor nodes of the cortex, subcortex, and cerebellum. Therefore, it is currently unknown whether tissue atrophy observed in non-motor related areas has any concomitant functional consequences. Furthermore, the neural underpinnings of adaptive neuroplasticity after SCI is not well-defined in the current literature. Hence, this dissertation is a pioneer study investigating …

Toward Magnetic Resonance Only Treatment Planning: Distortion Mitigation And Image-Guided Radiation Therapy Validation, Ryan Glen Price

Wayne State University Dissertations

While MR-only treatment planning has shown promise, there are still several well-known challenges that are currently limiting widespread clinical implementation.

Firstly, MR images are affected by both patient-induced and system-level geometric distortions that can significantly degrade treatment planning accuracy. . In addition, the availability of comprehensive distortion analysis software is currently limited. Also while many groups have been working toward a synthetic CT solution, further study is needed on the implementation of synCTs as the reference datasets for linac-based image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) to help determine their robustness in an MR-only workflow.

A 36×43×2 cm3 phantom with 255 known landmarks …

Impact Of Acl Injury On Patellar Cartilage Thickness, Ethan Leveillee

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

ACL injury has been shown to have long-lasting and severe consequences on the different structures of the knee such as the articular cartilage and meniscus. Cartilage thickness changes in particular are indicative of osteoarthritic changes in the tibiofemoral joint. While there has been significant research focused on cartilage changes of the tibia and femur, there has been little work looking at patellar cartilage. The following goals were set forth for this study. First, to establish a robust coordinate system to accurately determine the location and orientation of the patella. Secondly, to determine the effects of ACL injury on patellar cartilage …

Novel Phantoms And Post-Processing For Diffusion Spectrum Imaging, Vaibhav Juneja

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) techniques, including Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI), have been proposed to resolve crossing and other complex fiber architecture in the human brain white matter. In these methods, directional information of diffusion is inferred from the peaks in the orientation distribution function (ODF). Extensive studies using histology on macaque brain, cat cerebellum, rat hippocampus and optic tracts, and bovine tongue are qualitatively in agreement with the DSI-derived ODFs and tractography. However, there are only two studies in the literature which validated the DSI results using physical phantoms and both these studies were not performed on a …