1,989 research outputs found
A unified framework for cross-modality multi-atlas segmentation of brain MRI
Multi-atlas label fusion is a powerful image segmentation strategy that is becoming increasingly popular in medical imaging. A standard label fusion algorithm relies on independently computed pairwise registrations between individual atlases and the (target) image to be segmented. These registrations are then used to propagate the atlas labels to the target space and fuse them into a single final segmentation. Such label fusion schemes commonly rely on the similarity between intensity values of the atlases and target scan, which is often problematic in medical imaging - in particular, when the atlases and target images are obtained via different sensor types or imaging protocols. In this paper, we present a generative probabilistic model that yields an algorithm for solving the atlas-to-target registrations and label fusion steps simultaneously. The proposed model does not directly rely on the similarity of image intensities. Instead, it exploits the consistency of voxel intensities within the target scan to drive the registration and label fusion, hence the atlases and target image can be of different modalities. Furthermore, the framework models the joint warp of all the atlases, introducing interdependence between the registrations. We use variational expectation maximization and the Demons registration framework in order to efficiently identify the most probable segmentation and registrations. We use two sets of experiments to illustrate the approach, where proton density (PD) MRI atlases are used to segment T1-weighted brain scans and vice versa. Our results clearly demonstrate the accuracy gain due to exploiting within-target intensity consistency and integrating registration into label fusion
Medical Image Segmentation Based on Multi-Modal Convolutional Neural Network: Study on Image Fusion Schemes
Image analysis using more than one modality (i.e. multi-modal) has been
increasingly applied in the field of biomedical imaging. One of the challenges
in performing the multimodal analysis is that there exist multiple schemes for
fusing the information from different modalities, where such schemes are
application-dependent and lack a unified framework to guide their designs. In
this work we firstly propose a conceptual architecture for the image fusion
schemes in supervised biomedical image analysis: fusing at the feature level,
fusing at the classifier level, and fusing at the decision-making level.
Further, motivated by the recent success in applying deep learning for natural
image analysis, we implement the three image fusion schemes above based on the
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with varied structures, and combined into a
single framework. The proposed image segmentation framework is capable of
analyzing the multi-modality images using different fusing schemes
simultaneously. The framework is applied to detect the presence of soft tissue
sarcoma from the combination of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed
Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images. It is found from
the results that while all the fusion schemes outperform the single-modality
schemes, fusing at the feature level can generally achieve the best performance
in terms of both accuracy and computational cost, but also suffers from the
decreased robustness in the presence of large errors in any image modalities.Comment: Zhe Guo and Xiang Li contribute equally to this wor
Anatomical Priors in Convolutional Networks for Unsupervised Biomedical Segmentation
We consider the problem of segmenting a biomedical image into anatomical
regions of interest. We specifically address the frequent scenario where we
have no paired training data that contains images and their manual
segmentations. Instead, we employ unpaired segmentation images to build an
anatomical prior. Critically these segmentations can be derived from imaging
data from a different dataset and imaging modality than the current task. We
introduce a generative probabilistic model that employs the learned prior
through a convolutional neural network to compute segmentations in an
unsupervised setting. We conducted an empirical analysis of the proposed
approach in the context of structural brain MRI segmentation, using a
multi-study dataset of more than 14,000 scans. Our results show that an
anatomical prior can enable fast unsupervised segmentation which is typically
not possible using standard convolutional networks. The integration of
anatomical priors can facilitate CNN-based anatomical segmentation in a range
of novel clinical problems, where few or no annotations are available and thus
standard networks are not trainable. The code is freely available at
http://github.com/adalca/neuron.Comment: Presented at CVPR 2018. IEEE CVPR proceedings pp. 9290-929
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