3,580 research outputs found
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
To Learn or Not to Learn Features for Deformable Registration?
Feature-based registration has been popular with a variety of features
ranging from voxel intensity to Self-Similarity Context (SSC). In this paper,
we examine the question on how features learnt using various Deep Learning (DL)
frameworks can be used for deformable registration and whether this feature
learning is necessary or not. We investigate the use of features learned by
different DL methods in the current state-of-the-art discrete registration
framework and analyze its performance on 2 publicly available datasets. We draw
insights into the type of DL framework useful for feature learning and the
impact, if any, of the complexity of different DL models and brain parcellation
methods on the performance of discrete registration. Our results indicate that
the registration performance with DL features and SSC are comparable and stable
across datasets whereas this does not hold for low level features.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
Prior-based Coregistration and Cosegmentation
We propose a modular and scalable framework for dense coregistration and
cosegmentation with two key characteristics: first, we substitute ground truth
data with the semantic map output of a classifier; second, we combine this
output with population deformable registration to improve both alignment and
segmentation. Our approach deforms all volumes towards consensus, taking into
account image similarities and label consistency. Our pipeline can incorporate
any classifier and similarity metric. Results on two datasets, containing
annotations of challenging brain structures, demonstrate the potential of our
method.Comment: The first two authors contributed equall
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