Maria Francesca Spadea

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology | KIT

Background Extraction of mandibular third molars (M3Ms) is a routine procedure in oral and maxillofacial surgery, often associated with postoperative symptoms like pain, facial swelling, and trismus. This study aimed to introduce a standardized and automated protocol for swelling analysis following M3M surgery, presenting results regarding clinical...

Within this work, we introduce LIMIS: The first purely language-based interactive medical image segmentation model. We achieve this by adapting Grounded SAM to the medical domain and designing a language-based model interaction strategy that allows radiologists to incorporate their knowledge into the segmentation process. LIMIS produces high-qualit...

Purpose : Primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL) is typically treated with chemotherapy, steroids, and/or whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT). Identifying which patients benefit from WBRT following chemotherapy, and which patients can be adequately treated with chemotherapy alone remains a persistent clinical challenge. Although WBRT is associ...

Background Ultrahigh dose‐rate radiation (UHDR) produces less hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) in pure water, as suggested by some experimental studies, and is used as an argument for the validity of the theory that FLASH spares the normal tissue due to less reactive oxygen species (ROS) production. In contrast, most Monte Carlo simulation studies suggest...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing our clinical practice. This is particularly true in cardiology where the clinician is often required to handle a large amount of clinical, biological, and imaging data during decision making. In this context, AI can address the need for fast and accurate tools while reducing the burden on clinicians and impr...

Background The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has posed substantial challenges for healthcare systems, notably the increased demand for chest computed tomography (CT) scans, which lack automated analysis. Our study addresses this by utilizing artificial intelligence-supported automated computer analysis to investigate lung invo...

Simulation models and artificial intelligence are largely used to address healthcare and biomedical engineering problems. Both approaches showed promising results in the analysis and optimization of healthcare processes. Therefore, the combination of simulation models and artificial intelligence could provide a strategy to further boost the quality...

A minimally-invasive manipulator characterized by hyper-redundant kinematics and embedded sensing modules is presented in this work. The bending angles (tilt and pan) of the robot tip are controlled through tendon-driven actuation; the transmission of the actuation forces to the tip is based on a Bowden-cable solution integrating some channels for...

Background: The current study aimed to investigate the distribution and extent of lung involvement in patients with COVID-19, assess the relationship between lung involvement and the need for intensive care unit (ICU) admission and compare the performance of computer analysis with the judgment of radiological experts. Methods: A total of 81 patient...

Background: The current study aimed to investigate the distribution and extent of lung involvement in patients with COVID-19, assess the relationship between lung involvement and the need for intensive care unit (ICU) admission and compare the performance of computer analysis with the judgment of radiological experts. Methods: A total of 81 patient...

Background: The current study aimed to investigate the distribution and extent of lung involvement in patients with COVID-19, assess the relationship between lung involvement and the need for intensive care unit (ICU) admission and compare the performance of computer analysis with the judgment of radiological experts. Methods: A total of 81 patient...

Background: The current study aimed to investigate the distribution and extent of lung involvement in patients with COVID-19, assess the relationship between lung involvement and the need for intensive care unit (ICU) admission and compare the performance of computer analysis with the judgment of radiological experts. Methods: A total of 81 patient...

Background: The aim of the current study was to investigate the distribution and extent of lung involvement in patients with COVID-19 with AI-supported, automated computer analysis and to assess the relationship between lung involvement and the need for intensive care unit (ICU) admission. A secondary aim was to compare the performance of computer...

Clonogenic assays are routinely used to evaluate the response of cancer cells to external radiation fields, assess their radioresistance and radiosensitivity, estimate the performance of radiotherapy. However, classic clonogenic tests focus on the number of colonies forming on a substrate upon exposure to ionizing radiation, and disregard other imp...

Purpose: Primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL) is a rare, aggressive form of extranodal non-Hodgkin lymphoma. To predict the overall survival (OS) in advance is of utmost importance as it has the potential to aid clinical decision-making. Though radiomics-based machine learning (ML) has demonstrated the promising performance in PCNSL, it...

Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma (PCNSL) is an aggressive neoplasm with a poor prognosis. Although therapeutic progresses have significantly improved Overall Survival (OS), a number of patients do not respond to HD–MTX-based chemotherapy (15–25%) or experience relapse (25–50%) after an initial response. The reasons underlying this poor respo...

Background Time‐resolved 4D cone beam–computed tomography (4D‐CBCT) allows a daily assessment of patient anatomy and respiratory motion. However, 4D‐CBCTs suffer from imaging artifacts that affect the CT number accuracy and prevent accurate proton dose calculations. Deep learning can be used to correct CT numbers and generate synthetic CTs (sCTs) t...

The assessment of vascular complexity in the lower limbs provides relevant information about peripheral artery occlusive diseases (PAOD), thus fostering improvements both in therapeutic decisions and prognostic estimation. The current clinical practice consists of visually inspecting and evaluating cine-angiograms of the interested region, which is...

Radiation therapy (RT) is now considered to be a main component of cancer therapy, alongside surgery, chemotherapy and monoclonal antibody-based immunotherapy. In RT, cancer tissues are exposed to ionizing radiation causing the death of malignant cells and favoring cancer regression. However, the efficiency of RT may be hampered by cell-radioresist...

In this study, we investigated whether radiomics features can improve outcome prediction in patients with Primary Central Nervous System Lymphoma (PCNSL). 80 patients diagnosed with PCNSL were enrolled. Of these, 56 patients with complete Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) series (including T1-weighted, T2-weighted, 3D-T1 with gadolinium, and FLAIR)...

Coronary Angiography (CA) is the standard of reference to diagnose coronary artery disease. Yet, only a portion of the information it conveys is usually used. Quantitative Coronary Angiography (QCA) reliably contributes to improving the measurable assessment of CA. In this work, we developed a new software, CoroFinder, able to automatically identif...

Microarray is a powerful technology that enables the monitoring of expression levels for thousands of genes simultaneously, providing scientists with a full overview about DNA and RNA investigation. The process is made of three main phases: interaction with biological samples, data extraction, and data analysis. In particular, the data extraction p...

Purpose Adaptive proton therapy (APT) of lung cancer patients requires frequent volumetric imaging of diagnostic quality. Cone‐beam CT (CBCT) can provide these daily images, but x‐ray scattering limits CBCT‐image quality and hampers dose calculation accuracy. The purpose of this study was to generate CBCT‐based synthetic CTs using a deep convolutio...

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer in women worldwide and late diagnosis often adversely affects the prognosis of the disease. Radiotherapy is commonly used to treat breast cancer, reducing the risk of recurrence after surgery. However, the eradication of radioresistant cancer cells, including cancer stem cells, remains the main challenge of...

Recently,deep learning (DL)‐based methods for the generation of synthetic computed tomography (sCT) have received significant research attention as an alternative to classical ones. We present here a systematic review of these methods by grouping them into three categories, according to their clinical applications: (i) to replace computed tomograph...

The coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic is having a dramatic impact on society and healthcare systems. In this complex scenario, lung computerized tomography (CT) may play an important prognostic role. However, datasets released so far present limitations that hamper the development of tools for quantitative analysis. In this paper, we prese...

Recently, deep learning (DL)-based methods for the generation of synthetic computed tomography (sCT) have received significant research attention as an alternative to classical ones. We present here a systematic review of these methods by grouping them into three categories, according to their clinical applications: I) to replace CT in magnetic res...

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT)- and magnetic resonance (MR)-images allow a daily observation of patient anatomy but are not directly suited for accurate proton dose calculations. This can be overcome by creating synthetic CTs (sCT) using deep convolutional neural networks. In this study, we compared sCTs based on CBCTs and MRs for head and ne...

Interaction between medical image platform and external environment is a desirable feature in several clinical, research, and educational scenarios. In this work, the integration between 3D Slicer package and Arduino board is introduced, enabling a simple and useful communication between the two software/hardware platforms. The open source extensio...

With the advent of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), intra-operative imaging has become crucial for surgery and therapy guidance, allowing to partially compensate for the lack of information typical of MIS. This paper reviews the advancements in both classical (i.e. ultrasounds, X-ray, optical coherence tomography and magnetic resonance imaging) an...

Background: The targeting accuracy of proton therapy (PT) for moving soft-tissue tumours is expected to greatly improve by real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guidance. The integration of MRI and PT at the treatment isocenter would offer the opportunity of combining the unparalleled soft-tissue contrast and real-time imaging capabilities of...

In-room imaging is a prerequisite for adaptive proton therapy. The use of onboard cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) imaging, which is routinely acquired for patient position verification, can enable daily dose reconstructions and plan adaptation decisions. Image quality deficiencies though, hamper dose calculation accuracy and make corrections o...

The intricate relationships between innate immunity and brain diseases raise increased interest across the wide spectrum of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Barriers, such as the blood–brain barrier, and innate immunity cells such as microglia, astrocytes, macrophages, and mast cells are involved in triggering disease events in the...

Radiation therapy is one of the most important strategies for treating patients with tumor. The rationale is to deliver high radiation doses to the tumor in order to damage its DNA while sparing, at the same time, healthy tissues. In order to optimize such a process, biomedical images play a fundamental role; in particular, Magnetic Resonance (MR)...

External-beam radiotherapy followed by High Dose Rate (HDR) brachytherapy is the standard-of-care for treating gynecologic cancers. The enhanced soft-tissue contrast provided by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) makes it a valuable imaging modality for diagnosing and treating these cancers. However, in contrast to Computed Tomography (CT) imaging, t...

Purpose: The first aim of this work is to present a novel deep convolution neural network (DCNN) multiplane approach and compare it to single-plane prediction of synthetic computed tomography (sCT) by using the real computed tomography (CT) as ground truth. The second aim is to demonstrate the feasibility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based...

The data of literature are discordant about the role of mast cells in different types of neoplasms. In this paper the authors propose the hypothesis that tumor-associated mast cells may switch to different polarization states, conditioning the immunogenic capacities of the different neoplasms. Anti-inflammatory polarized mast cells should express c...

Purpose In radiation therapy, a key step for a successful cancer treatment is image-based treatment planning. One objective of the planning phase is the fast and accurate segmentation of organs at risk and target structures from medical images. However, manual delineation of organs, which is still the gold standard in many clinical environments, is...

Recent studies have clarified many still unknown aspects related to innate immunity and the blood-brain barrier relationship. They have also confirmed the close links between effector immune system cells, such as granulocytes, macrophages, microglia, natural killer cells and mast cells, and barrier functionality. The latter, in turn, is able to inf...

The assessment of vascular complexity in the lower limbs provides important information about peripheral artery diseases, with a relevant impact on both therapeutic decisions and on prognostic estimation. Currently, the evaluation is carried out by visual inspection of cine-angiograms, which is largely operator-dependent. An automatic image analysi...

Multi Atlas Based Segmentation (MABS) uses a database of atlas images, and an atlas selection process is used to choose an atlas subset for registration and voting. In the current state of the art, atlases are chosen according to a similarity criterion between the target subject and each atlas in the database. In this paper, we propose a new concep...

Purpose: To investigate advanced multi-modal methods for pseudo-CT generation from standard MRI sequences and to validate the results by IMRT and VMAT radiation therapy plans. We present two novel methods which employ key techniques to enhance pseudo-CTs and we investigate the impact on image quality and applicability for IMRT and VMAT therapy pla...

Background: In radiotherapy, MR imaging is only used because it has significantly better soft tissue contrast than CT, but it lacks electron density information needed for dose calculation. This work assesses the feasibility of using pseudo-CT (pCT) generated from T1w/T2w MR for proton treatment planning, where proton range comparisons are performe...

Multi Atlas Based Segmentation (MABS) uses a database of atlas images, and an atlas selection process is used to choose an atlas subset for registration and voting. In the current state of the art, atlases are chosen according to a similarity criterion between the target subject and each atlas in the database. In this paper, we propose a new concep...

The purpose of this work is to present and validate a novel approach for ultra-sound-based speckle tracking to measure the carotid artery longitudinal displacement, and to assess the apparent sliding between of Intima-Media Complex (IMC) and Adventitia (Ad) layers. This method utilizes feature detectors and descriptors to localize and track keypoin...

Purpose: Automated delineation of structures and organs is a key step in medical imaging. However, due to the large number and diversity of structures and the large variety of segmentation algorithms a consensus is lacking as to which automated segmentation method works best for certain applications. Segmentation challenges are a good approach for...

Objectives: Atlas-based automatic segmentation (ABAS) addresses the challenges of accuracy and reliability in manual segmentation. We aim to evaluate the contribution of specific-purpose in ABAS of breast cancer (BC) patients with respect to generic-purpose libraries. Materials and methods: One generic-purpose and 9 specific-purpose libraries, s...

During the last years Deep Learning and especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have set new standards for different computer vision tasks like image classification and semantic segmentation. In this paper, a CNN for 3D volume segmentation based on recently introduced deep learning components will be presented. In addition to using image pat...

Purpose: Multiatlas based segmentation is largely used in many clinical and research applications. Due to its good performances, it has recently been included in some commercial platforms for radiotherapy planning and surgery guidance. Anyway, to date, a software with no restrictions about the anatomical district and image modality is still missing...

Purpose:In this work we present the validation of Plastimatch MABS, an open source software for multi atlas based segmentation of medical images. Methods:The validation was performed on two different clinical datasets: 1) 25 CT image volumes of patients treated for H&N cancer; 2) 20 MRI series of patients having a neurological diagnosis. For the fi...

To improve the contouring of clinical target volume for the radiotherapy of neck Hodgkin/non-Hodgkin lymphoma by localizing the prechemotherapy gross target volume onto the simulation computed tomography using [(18)F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography. The gross target volume delineated on prechemotherapy [(18)F]-f...