8,948 research outputs found
A comparative evaluation of 3 different free-form deformable image registration and contour propagation methods for head and neck MRI : the case of parotid changes radiotherapy
Purpose: To validate and compare the deformable image registration and parotid contour propagation process for head and neck magnetic resonance imaging in patients treated with radiotherapy using 3 different approachesthe commercial MIM, the open-source Elastix software, and an optimized version of it.
Materials and Methods: Twelve patients with head and neck cancer previously treated with radiotherapy were considered. Deformable image registration and parotid contour propagation were evaluated by considering the magnetic resonance images acquired before and after the end of the treatment. Deformable image registration, based on free-form deformation method, and contour propagation available on MIM were compared to Elastix. Two different contour propagation approaches were implemented for Elastix software, a conventional one (DIR_Trx) and an optimized homemade version, based on mesh deformation (DIR_Mesh). The accuracy of these 3 approaches was estimated by comparing propagated to manual contours in terms of average symmetric distance, maximum symmetric distance, Dice similarity coefficient, sensitivity, and inclusiveness.
Results: A good agreement was generally found between the manual contours and the propagated ones, without differences among the 3 methods; in few critical cases with complex deformations, DIR_Mesh proved to be more accurate, having the lowest values of average symmetric distance and maximum symmetric distance and the highest value of Dice similarity coefficient, although nonsignificant. The average propagation errors with respect to the reference contours are lower than the voxel diagonal (2 mm), and Dice similarity coefficient is around 0.8 for all 3 methods.
Conclusion: The 3 free-form deformation approaches were not significantly different in terms of deformable image registration accuracy and can be safely adopted for the registration and parotid contour propagation during radiotherapy on magnetic resonance imaging. More optimized approaches (as DIR_Mesh) could be preferable for critical deformations
Learning Deep Similarity Metric for 3D MR-TRUS Registration
Purpose: The fusion of transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) and magnetic resonance
(MR) images for guiding targeted prostate biopsy has significantly improved the
biopsy yield of aggressive cancers. A key component of MR-TRUS fusion is image
registration. However, it is very challenging to obtain a robust automatic
MR-TRUS registration due to the large appearance difference between the two
imaging modalities. The work presented in this paper aims to tackle this
problem by addressing two challenges: (i) the definition of a suitable
similarity metric and (ii) the determination of a suitable optimization
strategy.
Methods: This work proposes the use of a deep convolutional neural network to
learn a similarity metric for MR-TRUS registration. We also use a composite
optimization strategy that explores the solution space in order to search for a
suitable initialization for the second-order optimization of the learned
metric. Further, a multi-pass approach is used in order to smooth the metric
for optimization.
Results: The learned similarity metric outperforms the classical mutual
information and also the state-of-the-art MIND feature based methods. The
results indicate that the overall registration framework has a large capture
range. The proposed deep similarity metric based approach obtained a mean TRE
of 3.86mm (with an initial TRE of 16mm) for this challenging problem.
Conclusion: A similarity metric that is learned using a deep neural network
can be used to assess the quality of any given image registration and can be
used in conjunction with the aforementioned optimization framework to perform
automatic registration that is robust to poor initialization.Comment: To appear on IJCAR
Registration of Brain MRI/PET Images Based on Adaptive Combination of Intensity and Gradient Field Mutual Information
Traditional mutual information (MI) function aligns two
multimodality images with intensity information, lacking spatial
information, so that it usually presents many local maxima that can
lead to inaccurate registration. Our paper proposes an algorithm of
adaptive combination of intensity and gradient field mutual
information (ACMI). Gradient code maps (GCM) are constructed by
coding gradient field information of corresponding original images.
The gradient field MI, calculated from GCMs, can provide
complementary properties to intensity MI. ACMI combines intensity MI
and gradient field MI with a nonlinear weight function, which can
automatically adjust the proportion between two types MI in
combination to improve registration. Experimental results
demonstrate that ACMI outperforms the traditional MI and it is much
less sensitive to reduced resolution or overlap of images
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A Hybrid Similarity Measure Framework for Multimodal Medical Image Registration
Medical imaging is widely used today to facilitate both disease diagnosis and treatment planning practice, with a key prerequisite being the systematic process of medical image registration (MIR) to align either mono or multimodal images of different anatomical parts of the human body. MIR utilises a similarity measure (SM) to quantify the level of spatial alignment and is particularly demanding due to the presence of inherent modality characteristics like intensity non-uniformities (INU) in magnetic resonance images and large homogeneous non-vascular regions in retinal images. While various intensity and feature-based SMs exist for MIR, mutual information (MI) has become established because of its computational efficiency and ability to register multimodal images. It is however, very sensitive to interpolation artefacts in the presence of INU with noise and can be compromised when overlapping areas are small. Recently MI-based hybrid variants which combine regional features with intensity have emerged, though these incur high dimensionality and large computational overheads.
To address these challenges and secure accurate, efficient and robust registration of images containing high INU, noise and large homogeneous regions, this thesis presents a new hybrid SM framework for 2D multimodal rigid MIR. The framework consistently provides superior quantitative and qualitative performance, while offering a uniquely flexible design trade-off between registration accuracy and computational time. It makes three significant technical contributions to the field: i) An expectation maximisation-based principal component analysis with mutual information (EMPCA-MI) framework incorporating neighbourhood feature information; ii) Two innovative enhancements to reduce information redundancy and improve MI computational efficiency; and iii) an adaptive algorithm to select the most significant principal components for feature selection.
The thesis findings conclusively confirm the hybrid SM framework offers an accurate and robust 2D registration solution for challenging multimodal medical imaging datasets, while its inherent flexibility means it can also be extended to the 3D registration domain
Depth video enhancement for 3D displays
At the current stage of technology, depth maps acquired using cameras based on a time-of-flight principle have much lower spatial resolution compared to images that are captured by conventional color cameras. The main idea of our work is to use high resolution color images to improve the spatial resolution and image quality of the depth maps
Accuracy assessment of Tri-plane B-mode ultrasound for non-invasive 3D kinematic analysis of knee joints
BACKGROUND Currently the clinical standard for measuring the motion of the bones in knee joints with sufficient precision involves implanting tantalum beads into the bones. These beads appear as high intensity features in radiographs and can be used for precise kinematic measurements. This procedure imposes a strong coupling between accuracy and invasiveness. In this paper, a tri-plane B-mode ultrasound (US) based non-invasive approach is proposed for use in kinematic analysis of knee joints in 3D space. METHODS The 3D analysis is performed using image processing procedures on the 2D US slices. The novelty of the proposed procedure and its applicability to the unconstrained 3D kinematic analysis of knee joints is outlined. An error analysis for establishing the method's feasibility is included for different artificial compositions of a knee joint phantom. Some in-vivo and in-vitro scans are presented to demonstrate that US scans reveal enough anatomical details, which further supports the experimental setup used using knee bone phantoms. RESULTS The error between the displacements measured by the registration of the US image slices and the true displacements of the respective slices measured using the precision mechanical stages on the experimental apparatus is evaluated for translation and rotation in two simulated environments. The mean and standard deviation of errors are shown in tabular form. This method provides an average measurement precision of less than 0.1 mm and 0.1 degrees, respectively. CONCLUSION In this paper, we have presented a novel non-invasive approach to measuring the motion of the bones in a knee using tri-plane B-mode ultrasound and image registration. In our study, the image registration method determines the position of bony landmarks relative to a B-mode ultrasound sensor array with sub-pixel accuracy. The advantages of our proposed system over previous techniques are that it is non-invasive, does not require the use of ionizing radiation and can be used conveniently if miniaturized.This work has been supported by School of Engineering & IT, UNSW Canberra, under Research Publication Fellowship
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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