Toni Lassila

Yash Deo, Haoran Dou, Nishant Ravikumar et al.

The Circle of Willis (CoW) is the part of cerebral vasculature responsible for delivering blood to the brain. Understanding the diverse anatomical variations and configurations of the CoW is paramount to advance research on cerebrovascular diseases and refine clinical interventions. However, comprehensive investigation of less prevalent CoW variations remains challenging because of the dominance of a few commonly occurring configurations. We propose a novel generative approach utilising a conditional latent diffusion model with shape and anatomical guidance to generate realistic 3D CoW segmentations, including different phenotypical variations. Our conditional latent diffusion model incorporates shape guidance to better preserve vessel continuity and demonstrates superior performance when compared to alternative generative models, including conditional variants of 3D GAN and 3D VAE. We observed that our model generated CoW variants that are more realistic and demonstrate higher visual fidelity than competing approaches with an FID score 53\% better than the best-performing GAN-based model.

Toni Lassila, Gianluigi Rozza

We propose a two-fold approach to model reduction of fluid-structure interaction. The state equations for the fluid are solved with reduced basis methods. These are model reduction methods for parametric partial differential equations using well-chosen snapshot solutions in order to build a set of global basis functions. The other reduction is in terms of the geometric complexity of the moving fluid-structure interface. We use free-form deformations to parameterize the perturbation of the flow channel at rest configuration. As a computational example we consider a steady fluid-structure interaction problem: an incmpressible Stokes flow in a channel that has a flexible wall.

Yash Deo, Rodrigo Bonazzola, Haoran Dou et al.

Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) is an imaging modality for visualising blood vessels. It is useful for several diagnostic applications and for assessing the risk of adverse events such as haemorrhagic stroke (resulting from the rupture of aneurysms in blood vessels). However, MRAs are not acquired routinely, hence, an approach to synthesise blood vessel segmentations from more routinely acquired MR contrasts such as T1 and T2, would be useful. We present an encoder-decoder model for synthesising segmentations of the main cerebral arteries in the circle of Willis (CoW) from only T2 MRI. We propose a two-phase multi-objective learning approach, which captures both global and local features. It uses learned local attention maps generated by dilating the segmentation labels, which forces the network to only extract information from the T2 MRI relevant to synthesising the CoW. Our synthetic vessel segmentations generated from only T2 MRI achieved a mean Dice score of $0.79 \pm 0.03$ in testing, compared to state-of-the-art segmentation networks such as transformer U-Net ($0.71 \pm 0.04$) and nnU-net($0.68 \pm 0.05$), while using only a fraction of the parameters. The main qualitative difference between our synthetic vessel segmentations and the comparative models was in the sharper resolution of the CoW vessel segments, especially in the posterior circulation.

Yash Deo, Yan Jia, Toni Lassila et al.

Evaluating generative models for synthetic medical imaging is crucial yet challenging, especially given the high standards of fidelity, anatomical accuracy, and safety required for clinical applications. Standard evaluation of generated images often relies on no-reference image quality metrics when ground truth images are unavailable, but their reliability in this complex domain is not well established. This study comprehensively assesses commonly used no-reference image quality metrics using brain MRI data, including tumour and vascular images, providing a representative exemplar for the field. We systematically evaluate metric sensitivity to a range of challenges, including noise, distribution shifts, and, critically, localised morphological alterations designed to mimic clinically relevant inaccuracies. We then compare these metric scores against model performance on a relevant downstream segmentation task, analysing results across both controlled image perturbations and outputs from different generative model architectures. Our findings reveal significant limitations: many widely-used no-reference image quality metrics correlate poorly with downstream task suitability and exhibit a profound insensitivity to localised anatomical details crucial for clinical validity. Furthermore, these metrics can yield misleading scores regarding distribution shifts, e.g. data memorisation. This reveals the risk of misjudging model readiness, potentially leading to the deployment of flawed tools that could compromise patient safety. We conclude that ensuring generative models are truly fit for clinical purpose requires a multifaceted validation framework, integrating performance on relevant downstream tasks with the cautious interpretation of carefully selected no-reference image quality metrics.

Toni Lassila, Cristiano Malossi, Marco Stevanella et al.

Computer modeling can provide quantitative insight into cardiac fluid dynamics phenomena that are not evident from standard imaging tools. We propose a new approach to modeling left ventricle fluid dynamics based on an image-driven model-based description of ventricular motion. In this approach, the end-diastolic geometry and time-dependent deformation of the left ventricle cavity are obtained from cardiac magnetic resonance images and a fictitious elastic structure is used to impose the contractile behavior of the left ventricle. This allows seamless treatment of the isovolumic phases. Besides the ventricular motion, the intracavitary fluid dynamics is controlled by the mitral valve. Three different mitral valve models are included in the simulation: an idealized diode (with or without regurgitation) and a lumped parameter model accounting for the opening dynamics of the valve and including regurgitation.