Preoperative Planning and Simulation Framework for Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome Fetal Surgery
List of results published directly linked with the projects co-funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the María de Maeztu Units of Excellence Program (MDM-2015-0502).
List of publications acknowledging the funding in Scopus.
The record for each publication will include access to postprints (following the Open Access policy of the program), as well as datasets and software used. Ongoing work with UPF Library and Informatics will improve the interface and automation of the retrieval of this information soon.
The MdM Strategic Research Program has its own community in Zenodo for material available in this repository 
as well as at the UPF e-repository 
Torrents-Barrena J, López-Velazco R, Masoller N, Valenzuela-Alcaraz B, Gratacós E, Eixarch E, Ceresa M, González Ballester MA. Preoperative Planning and Simulation Framework for Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome Fetal Surgery. CARE 2018, CLIP 2018, OR 2.0 2018, ISIC 2018: OR 2.0 Context-Aware Operating Theaters, Computer Assisted Robotic Endoscopy, Clinical Image-Based Procedures, and Skin Image Analysis
Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS) is a complication of monochorionic twin pregnancies in which arteriovenous vascular communications in the shared placenta lead to blood transfer between the fetuses. Selective fetoscopic laser photocoagulation of abnormal blood vessel connections has become the most effective treatment. Preoperative planning is thus an essential prerequisite to increase survival rates for severe TTTS. In this work, we present the very first TTTS fetal surgery planning and simulation framework. The placenta is segmented in both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and 3D ultrasound (US) via novel 3D convolutional neural networks. Likewise, the umbilical cord is extracted in MRI using 3D convolutional long short-term memory units. The detection of the placenta vascular tree is carried out through a curvature-based corner detector in MRI, and the Modified Spatial Kernelized Fuzzy C-Means with a Markov random field refinement in 3D US. The proposed TTTS planning software integrates all aforementioned algorithms to explore the intrauterine environment by simulating the fetoscope camera, determine the correct entry point, train doctors’ movements ahead of surgery, and consequently, improve the success rate and reduce the operation time. The promising results indicate potential of our TTTS planner and simulator for further assessment on clinical real surgeries.