19,191 research outputs found
Monte Carlo-based Noise Compensation in Coil Intensity Corrected Endorectal MRI
Background: Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer found
in males making early diagnosis important. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has
been useful in visualizing and localizing tumor candidates and with the use of
endorectal coils (ERC), the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved. The
coils introduce intensity inhomogeneities and the surface coil intensity
correction built into MRI scanners is used to reduce these inhomogeneities.
However, the correction typically performed at the MRI scanner level leads to
noise amplification and noise level variations. Methods: In this study, we
introduce a new Monte Carlo-based noise compensation approach for coil
intensity corrected endorectal MRI which allows for effective noise
compensation and preservation of details within the prostate. The approach
accounts for the ERC SNR profile via a spatially-adaptive noise model for
correcting non-stationary noise variations. Such a method is useful
particularly for improving the image quality of coil intensity corrected
endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner level and when the original
raw data is not available. Results: SNR and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR)
analysis in patient experiments demonstrate an average improvement of 11.7 dB
and 11.2 dB respectively over uncorrected endorectal MRI, and provides strong
performance when compared to existing approaches. Conclusions: A new noise
compensation method was developed for the purpose of improving the quality of
coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI scanner
level. We illustrate that promising noise compensation performance can be
achieved for the proposed approach, which is particularly important for
processing coil intensity corrected endorectal MRI data performed at the MRI
scanner level and when the original raw data is not available.Comment: 23 page
Characterization of age-related microstructural changes in locus coeruleus and substantia nigra pars compacta.
Locus coeruleus (LC) and substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) degrade with normal aging, but not much is known regarding how these changes manifest in MRI images, or whether these markers predict aspects of cognition. Here, we use high-resolution diffusion-weighted MRI to investigate microstructural and compositional changes in LC and SNpc in young and older adult cohorts, as well as their relationship with cognition. In LC, the older cohort exhibited a significant reduction in mean and radial diffusivity, but a significant increase in fractional anisotropy compared with the young cohort. We observed a significant correlation between the decrease in LC mean, axial, and radial diffusivities and measures examining cognition (Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test delayed recall) in the older adult cohort. This observation suggests that LC is involved in retaining cognitive abilities. In addition, we observed that iron deposition in SNpc occurs early in life and continues during normal aging
Computerized Analysis of Magnetic Resonance Images to Study Cerebral Anatomy in Developing Neonates
The study of cerebral anatomy in developing neonates is of great importance for
the understanding of brain development during the early period of life. This
dissertation therefore focuses on three challenges in the modelling of cerebral
anatomy in neonates during brain development. The methods that have been
developed all use Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) as source data.
To facilitate study of vascular development in the neonatal period, a set of image
analysis algorithms are developed to automatically extract and model cerebral
vessel trees. The whole process consists of cerebral vessel tracking from
automatically placed seed points, vessel tree generation, and vasculature
registration and matching. These algorithms have been tested on clinical Time-of-
Flight (TOF) MR angiographic datasets.
To facilitate study of the neonatal cortex a complete cerebral cortex segmentation
and reconstruction pipeline has been developed. Segmentation of the neonatal
cortex is not effectively done by existing algorithms designed for the adult brain
because the contrast between grey and white matter is reversed. This causes pixels
containing tissue mixtures to be incorrectly labelled by conventional methods. The
neonatal cortical segmentation method that has been developed is based on a novel
expectation-maximization (EM) method with explicit correction for mislabelled
partial volume voxels. Based on the resulting cortical segmentation, an implicit
surface evolution technique is adopted for the reconstruction of the cortex in
neonates. The performance of the method is investigated by performing a detailed
landmark study.
To facilitate study of cortical development, a cortical surface registration algorithm
for aligning the cortical surface is developed. The method first inflates extracted
cortical surfaces and then performs a non-rigid surface registration using free-form
deformations (FFDs) to remove residual alignment. Validation experiments using
data labelled by an expert observer demonstrate that the method can capture local
changes and follow the growth of specific sulcus
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