Chiara Carminati

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Paul Scherrer Institute

A crucial criterion for the quality of the additively manufactured parts is the porosity content for achieving an acceptable final relative density. In addition, for jewelry applications, visible pores are unacceptable at or in the vicinity of the surface. In this study, non-destructive 3D neutron microtomography is applied to map the spatial distr...

3D printing of cementitious materials is a developing technology in which structural elements are built via a layer-by-layer process. Among the many advantages of this technique, it is expected to lead to more sustainable structures due to a reduced waste generation and more efficient structural design, placing materials only where needed. However,...

Objective Statistical shape modelling (SSM) has established as a powerful method for segmenting the left ventricle in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images However, applying them to segment the right ventricle (RV) is not straightforward because of the complex structure of this chamber. Our aim was to develop a new inter-modality SSM-based approa...

Additive manufacturing is a promising and rapidly rising technology in metal processing. However, besides a number of key advantages the constitution of a part through a complex thermo-mechanical process implies also some severe issues with the potential of impacting the quality of products. In laser powder bed fusion (LPBF), the most applied metal...

Within neutron imaging, different methods have been developed with the aim to go beyond the conventional contrast modalities, such as grating interferometry. Existing grating interferometers are sensitive to scattering in a single direction only, and thus investigations of anisotropic scattering structures imply the need for a circular scan of eith...

4D wavelength-resolved neutron tomography of a reference sample made of several polycrystalline materials, namely nickel, iron, titanium, lead, copper and aluminium, is presented. Data were acquired using the time-of-flight transmission imaging method at the IMAT beamline at the ISIS pulsed neutron source. Wavelength-dispersive tomography reconstru...

KipTool is a multi-platform general purpose software to process and enhance 2D and 3D imaging data implemented in C++. It was first developed to process data coming from neutron imaging experiments performed at Paul Scherrer Institut. Meanwhile, it has evolved into a general purpose tool that makes it suitable to process more broadly imaging datase...

We describe in this paper the experimental procedure, the data treatment and the quantification of the black body correction: an experimental approach to compensate for scattering and systematic biases in quantitative neutron imaging based on experimental data. The correction algorithm is based on two steps; estimation of the scattering component a...

Structural properties of cohesive powders are dominated by its microstructural composition. Powders with a fractal microstructure show particularly interesting properties during compaction where a microstructural transition and a fractal breakdown happen before compaction and force transport. The study of this phenomenon has been challenging due to...

We propose a method for improving the quantification of neutron imaging measurements with scintillator-camera based detectors by correcting for systematic biases introduced by scattered neutrons and other sources such as light reflections in the detector system. This method is fully experimental, using reference measurements with a grid of small bl...

The development of neutron imaging from a qualitative inspection tool towards a quantitative technique in materials science has increased the requirements for accuracy significantly. Quantifying the thickness or the density of polycrystalline samples with high accuracy using neutron imaging has two main problems: (i) the scattering from the sample...

Object: We present in this paper the application of a statistical shape model of the left ventricle (LV) built from transthoracic real time 3D echocardiography (3DE) to segment the LV endocardium and epicardium in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. Material and methods: The LV model was built from a training database constituted by over 90...

Computerized analysis plays a crucial role to in quantifying cardiac function from non-invasive imaging. To this respect, model-based techniques, such as statistical shape models (SSMs), have become a popular solution for the detection of different cardiac structures. In this two-steps approach, a statistical model, trained on a set of samples to e...

For experiments with low contrast between the relevant features it can be beneficial to add a second modality to reduce ambiguity. At Paul Scherrer Institut the two neutron imaging facilities NEUTRA (thermal neutrons) and ICON (cold neutrons) we have installed X-ray beamlines for on-site bimodal imaging with neutrons and X-rays. This allows us to l...

Statistical shape modelling (SSM) approaches have been proposed as a powerful tool to segment the left ventricle in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. Our aim was to extend this method to segment the RV cavity in CMR images and validate it compared to the conventional gold-standard (GS) manual tracing. A SSM of the RV was built using a databa...

Background: Percutaneous mitral valve repair (PMVR) is an alternative treatment in patients with significant mitral regurgitation (MR) who are denied surgery. Although in surgical patients, outcomes have been related both to acute hemodynamic favorable results and to positive cardiac remodeling in the midterm, in the case of PMVR the effect on car...

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare the performance of quantitative methods, either semiautomated or automated, for left ventricular (LV) nonviable tissue analysis from cardiac magnetic resonance late gadolinium enhancement (CMR-LGE) images. Materials and methods: The investigated segmentation techniques were: (i) n-standard deviations...

We evaluate in this paper different strategies for the construction of a statistical shape model (SSM) of the left ventricle (LV) to be used for segmentation in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. From a large database of LV surfaces obtained throughout the cardiac cycle from 3D echocardiographic (3DE) LV images, different LV shape models were...

A robust and efficient approach to reconstruction of the descending thoracic aorta from contiguous 3-D transesophageal echocardiographic (TEE) images is proposed. An ad hoc image acquisition protocol was designed to acquire ordered and partially overlapped 3-D TEE data sets, followed by dedicated image processing to align and fuse all acquired data...

Aims: To propose a nearly automated left ventricular (LV) three-dimensional (3D) surface segmentation procedure, based on active shape modelling (ASM) and built on a database of 3D echocardiographic (3DE) LV surfaces, for cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images, and to test its accuracy for LV volumes computation compared with 'gold standard' manu...

We propose a robust and efficient approach for the reconstruction of the descending aorta from contiguous 3D transesophageal echocardiographic (TEE) images. It is based on an ad hoc protocol, designed to acquire ordered and partially overlapped 3D TEE datasets, followed by automated image registration that relies on this a priori knowledge. The met...

Background: We aimed at developing and testing a nearly automated method for breath-hold artifacts compensation in short-axis (SA) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images. The purpose was the reduction of potential misalignment between standard cine SA and two- and four-chamber long-axis (LA) CMR images to allow 3D reconstruction for segmentation...

A framework for computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) image fusion is proposed for potential application in cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). The MR dataset has been pre-processed compensating for organ motion induced inter-slices misalignment. The geometrical center alignment of CT and MR short axis (SAX) reconstructed 3D vol...

We aimed at developing and testing an automated method for motion artifacts compensation, to reduce potential misalignment between short-axis (SAX) and two-and four-chamber long-axis (2ch4chLAX) cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images that could introduce artifacts in advanced 3D volumetric analysis, thus precluding accurate measurements. Each SAX...

Despite cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) is the reference imaging technique for the evaluation of ventricular function, its use for the assessment of tricuspid valve is still minimal. Tricuspid annulus (TA) evaluation in 3D is feasible from CMR when performed in rotational long-axis. However, this process is based on manual identification of TA ref...

Two different methods for semi-automated right ventricular (RV) endocardial border detection from MR images, based on different implementation of level set technique, have been developed and validated. Dynamic, ECG-gated, steady-state free precession short axis images were obtained in 26 consecutive patients. An expert cardiologist provided the “go...