617 research outputs found
Volumetric MRI Reconstruction from 2D Slices in the Presence of Motion
Despite recent advances in acquisition techniques and reconstruction algorithms, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging in the presence of motion. To mitigate this, ultra-fast two-dimensional (2D) MRI sequences are often used in clinical practice to acquire thick, low-resolution (LR) 2D slices to reduce in-plane motion. The resulting stacks of thick 2D slices typically provide high-quality visualizations when viewed in the in-plane direction. However, the low spatial resolution in the through-plane direction in combination with motion commonly occurring between individual slice acquisitions gives rise to stacks with overall limited geometric integrity. In further consequence, an accurate and reliable diagnosis may be compromised when using such motion-corrupted, thick-slice MRI data. This thesis presents methods to volumetrically reconstruct geometrically consistent, high-resolution (HR) three-dimensional (3D) images from motion-corrupted, possibly sparse, low-resolution 2D MR slices. It focuses on volumetric reconstructions techniques using inverse problem formulations applicable to a broad field of clinical applications in which associated motion patterns are inherently different, but the use of thick-slice MR data is current clinical practice. In particular, volumetric reconstruction frameworks are developed based on slice-to-volume registration with inter-slice transformation regularization and robust, complete-outlier rejection for the reconstruction step that can either avoid or efficiently deal with potential slice-misregistrations. Additionally, this thesis describes efficient Forward-Backward Splitting schemes for image registration for any combination of differentiable (not necessarily convex) similarity measure and convex (not necessarily smooth) regularization with a tractable proximal operator. Experiments are performed on fetal and upper abdominal MRI, and on historical, printed brain MR films associated with a uniquely long-term study dating back to the 1980s. The results demonstrate the broad applicability of the presented frameworks to achieve robust reconstructions with the potential to improve disease diagnosis and patient management in clinical practice
Automated template-based brain localization and extraction for fetal brain MRI reconstruction.
Most fetal brain MRI reconstruction algorithms rely only on brain tissue-relevant voxels of low-resolution (LR) images to enhance the quality of inter-slice motion correction and image reconstruction. Consequently the fetal brain needs to be localized and extracted as a first step, which is usually a laborious and time consuming manual or semi-automatic task. We have proposed in this work to use age-matched template images as prior knowledge to automatize brain localization and extraction. This has been achieved through a novel automatic brain localization and extraction method based on robust template-to-slice block matching and deformable slice-to-template registration. Our template-based approach has also enabled the reconstruction of fetal brain images in standard radiological anatomical planes in a common coordinate space. We have integrated this approach into our new reconstruction pipeline that involves intensity normalization, inter-slice motion correction, and super-resolution (SR) reconstruction. To this end we have adopted a novel approach based on projection of every slice of the LR brain masks into the template space using a fusion strategy. This has enabled the refinement of brain masks in the LR images at each motion correction iteration. The overall brain localization and extraction algorithm has shown to produce brain masks that are very close to manually drawn brain masks, showing an average Dice overlap measure of 94.5%. We have also demonstrated that adopting a slice-to-template registration and propagation of the brain mask slice-by-slice leads to a significant improvement in brain extraction performance compared to global rigid brain extraction and consequently in the quality of the final reconstructed images. Ratings performed by two expert observers show that the proposed pipeline can achieve similar reconstruction quality to reference reconstruction based on manual slice-by-slice brain extraction. The proposed brain mask refinement and reconstruction method has shown to provide promising results in automatic fetal brain MRI segmentation and volumetry in 26 fetuses with gestational age range of 23 to 38 weeks
PVR: Patch-to-Volume Reconstruction for Large Area Motion Correction of Fetal MRI
In this paper we present a novel method for the correction of motion
artifacts that are present in fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of
the whole uterus. Contrary to current slice-to-volume registration (SVR)
methods, requiring an inflexible anatomical enclosure of a single investigated
organ, the proposed patch-to-volume reconstruction (PVR) approach is able to
reconstruct a large field of view of non-rigidly deforming structures. It
relaxes rigid motion assumptions by introducing a specific amount of redundant
information that is exploited with parallelized patch-wise optimization,
super-resolution, and automatic outlier rejection. We further describe and
provide an efficient parallel implementation of PVR allowing its execution
within reasonable time on commercially available graphics processing units
(GPU), enabling its use in the clinical practice. We evaluate PVR's
computational overhead compared to standard methods and observe improved
reconstruction accuracy in presence of affine motion artifacts of approximately
30% compared to conventional SVR in synthetic experiments. Furthermore, we have
evaluated our method qualitatively and quantitatively on real fetal MRI data
subject to maternal breathing and sudden fetal movements. We evaluate
peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), and
cross correlation (CC) with respect to the originally acquired data and provide
a method for visual inspection of reconstruction uncertainty. With these
experiments we demonstrate successful application of PVR motion compensation to
the whole uterus, the human fetus, and the human placenta.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Medical
Imaging. v2: wadded funders acknowledgements to preprin
A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis
Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly
become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews
the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and
summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the
last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object
detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise
overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for
future research are discussed.Comment: Revised survey includes expanded discussion section and reworked
introductory section on common deep architectures. Added missed papers from
before Feb 1st 201
Efficient multi-class fetal brain segmentation in high resolution MRI reconstructions with noisy labels
Segmentation of the developing fetal brain is an important step in
quantitative analyses. However, manual segmentation is a very time-consuming
task which is prone to error and must be completed by highly specialized
indi-viduals. Super-resolution reconstruction of fetal MRI has become standard
for processing such data as it improves image quality and resolution. However,
dif-ferent pipelines result in slightly different outputs, further complicating
the gen-eralization of segmentation methods aiming to segment super-resolution
data. Therefore, we propose using transfer learning with noisy multi-class
labels to automatically segment high resolution fetal brain MRIs using a single
set of seg-mentations created with one reconstruction method and tested for
generalizability across other reconstruction methods. Our results show that the
network can auto-matically segment fetal brain reconstructions into 7 different
tissue types, regard-less of reconstruction method used. Transfer learning
offers some advantages when compared to training without pre-initialized
weights, but the network trained on clean labels had more accurate
segmentations overall. No additional manual segmentations were required.
Therefore, the proposed network has the potential to eliminate the need for
manual segmentations needed in quantitative analyses of the fetal brain
independent of reconstruction method used, offering an unbiased way to quantify
normal and pathological neurodevelopment.Comment: Accepted for publication at PIPPI MICCAI 202
Novel Image Processing Methods for Improved Fetal Brain MRI
Fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been increasingly used as a powerful complement
imaging modality to ultrasound imaging (US) for the clinical evaluation of prenatal
abnormalities. Specifically, clinical application of fetal MRI has been significantly improved in
the nineties by hardware and software advances with the development of ultrafast multi-slice
T2-weighted (T2w) acquisition sequences able to freeze the unpredictable fetal motion and
provide excellent soft-tissue contrast. Fetal motion is indeed the major challenge in fetal
MRI and slice acquisition time should be kept as short as possible. As a result, typical fetal
MRI examination involves the acquisition of a set of orthogonally planned scans of thick
two-dimensional slices, largely free of intra-slice motion artifacts. The poor resolution in
the slice-select dimension as well as possible motion occurring between slices limits further
quantitative data analysis, which is the key for a better understanding of the developing
brain but also the key for the determination of operator-independent biomarkers that might
significantly facilitate fetal diagnosis and prognosis.
To this end, several research groups have developed in the past ten years advanced image
processing methods, often denoted by motion-robust super-resolution (SR) techniques, to
reconstruct from a set of clinical low-resolution (LR) scans, a high-resolution (HR) motion-free
volume. SR problem is usually modeled as a linear inverse problem describing the imaging
degradation due to acquisition and fetal motion. Typically, such approaches consist in iterating
between slice motion estimation that estimates the motion parameters and SR that recovers
the HR image given the estimated degradation model. This thesis focuses on the development
of novel advanced image processing methods, which have enabled the design of a completely
automated reconstruction pipeline for fetal MRI. The proposed techniques help in improving
state-of-the-art fetal MRI reconstruction in terms of efficiency, robustness and minimized
user-interactions, with the ultimate goal of being translated to the clinical environment.
The first part focuses on the development of a more efficient Total Variation (TV)-regularized
optimization algorithm for the SR problem. The algorithm uses recent advances in convex optimization
with a novel adaptive regularization strategy to offer simultaneously fast, accurate
and robust solutions to the fetal image recovery problem. Extensive validations on both
simulated fetal and real clinical data show the proposed algorithm is highly robust in front of
motion artifacts and that it offers the best trade-off between speed and accuracy for fetal MRI
recovery as in comparison with state-of-the art methods.
The second part focuses on the development of a novel automatic brain localization and
extraction approach based on template-to-slice block matching and deformable slice-totemplate
registration. Asmost fetal brain MRI reconstruction algorithms rely only on brain
tissue-relevant voxels of low-resolution (LR) images to enhance the quality of inter-slice motion
correction and image reconstruction, the fetal brain needs to be localized and extracted as
a first step. These tasks generally necessitate user interaction, manually or semi-automatically
done. Our methods have enabled the design of completely automated reconstruction pipeline
that involves intensity normalization, inter-slice motion estimation, and super-resolution.
Quantitative evaluation on clinical MRI scans shows that our approach produces brain masks
that are very close to manually drawn brain masks, and ratings performed by two expert
observers show that the proposed pipeline achieves similar reconstruction quality to reference
reconstruction based on manual slice-by-slice brain extraction without any further effort.
The third part investigates the possibility of automatic cortical folding quantification, one of
the best biomarkers of brain maturation, by combining our automatic reconstruction pipeline
with a state-of-the-art fetal brain tissue segmentation method and existing automated tools
provided for adult brain’s cortical folding quantification. Results indicate that our reconstruction
pipeline can provide HR MR images with sufficient quality that enable the use of surface
tessellation and active surface algorithms similar to those developed for adults to extract
meaningful information about fetal brain maturation.
Finally, the last part presents new methodological improvements of the reconstruction
pipeline aiming at improving the quality of the image for quantitative data analysis, whose
accuracy is highly dependent on the quality and resolution of the reconstructed image. In
particular, it presents a more consistent and global magnetic bias field correction method
which takes advantage of the super-resolution framework to provide a final reconstructed
image quasi free of the smooth bias field. Then, it presents a new TV SR algorithm that uses
the Huber norm in the data fidelity term to be more robust to non-Gaussian outliers. It
also presents the design of a novel joint reconstruction-segmentation framework and the
development of a novel TV SR algorithm driven by segmentation to produce images with
enhanced edge information that could ultimately improve their segmentation. Finally, it
preliminary investigates the capability of increasing the resolution in the in-plane dimensions
using SR to ultimately reduce the partial volume effect
Motion corrected 3D reconstruction of the fetal thorax from prenatal MRI
In this paper we present a semi-automatic method for analysis of the fetal thorax in genuine three-dimensional volumes. After one initial click we localize the spine and accurately determine the volume of the fetal lung from high resolution volumetric images reconstructed from motion corrupted prenatal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). We compare the current state-of-the-art method of segmenting the lung in a slice-by-slice manner with the most recent multi-scan reconstruction methods. We use fast rotation invariant spherical harmonics image descriptors with Classification Forest ensemble learning methods to extract the spinal cord and show an efficient way to generate a segmentation prior for the fetal lung from this information for two different MRI field strengths. The spinal cord can be segmented with a DICE coefficient of 0.89 and the automatic lung segmentation has been evaluated with a DICE coefficient of 0.87. We evaluate our method on 29 fetuses with a gestational age (GA) between 20 and 38 weeks and show that our computed segmentations and the manual ground truth correlate well with the recorded values in literature
Segmentation of the cortical plate in fetal brain MRI with a topological loss
The fetal cortical plate undergoes drastic morphological changes throughout
early in utero development that can be observed using magnetic resonance (MR)
imaging. An accurate MR image segmentation, and more importantly a
topologically correct delineation of the cortical gray matter, is a key
baseline to perform further quantitative analysis of brain development. In this
paper, we propose for the first time the integration of a topological
constraint, as an additional loss function, to enhance the morphological
consistency of a deep learning-based segmentation of the fetal cortical plate.
We quantitatively evaluate our method on 18 fetal brain atlases ranging from 21
to 38 weeks of gestation, showing the significant benefits of our method
through all gestational ages as compared to a baseline method. Furthermore,
qualitative evaluation by three different experts on 130 randomly selected
slices from 26 clinical MRIs evidences the out-performance of our method
independently of the MR reconstruction quality.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for
possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after
which this version may no longer be accessibl
Deep Learning in Cardiology
The medical field is creating large amount of data that physicians are unable
to decipher and use efficiently. Moreover, rule-based expert systems are
inefficient in solving complicated medical tasks or for creating insights using
big data. Deep learning has emerged as a more accurate and effective technology
in a wide range of medical problems such as diagnosis, prediction and
intervention. Deep learning is a representation learning method that consists
of layers that transform the data non-linearly, thus, revealing hierarchical
relationships and structures. In this review we survey deep learning
application papers that use structured data, signal and imaging modalities from
cardiology. We discuss the advantages and limitations of applying deep learning
in cardiology that also apply in medicine in general, while proposing certain
directions as the most viable for clinical use.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figures, 10 table
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