27,602 research outputs found
Dilatation of Lateral Ventricles with Brain Volumes in Infants with 3D Transfontanelle US
Ultrasound (US) can be used to assess brain development in newborns, as MRI
is challenging due to immobilization issues, and may require sedation.
Dilatation of the lateral ventricles in the brain is a risk factor for poorer
neurodevelopment outcomes in infants. Hence, 3D US has the ability to assess
the volume of the lateral ventricles similar to clinically standard MRI, but
manual segmentation is time consuming. The objective of this study is to
develop an approach quantifying the ratio of lateral ventricular dilatation
with respect to total brain volume using 3D US, which can assess the severity
of macrocephaly. Automatic segmentation of the lateral ventricles is achieved
with a multi-atlas deformable registration approach using locally linear
correlation metrics for US-MRI fusion, followed by a refinement step using
deformable mesh models. Total brain volume is estimated using a 3D ellipsoid
modeling approach. Validation was performed on a cohort of 12 infants, ranging
from 2 to 8.5 months old, where 3D US and MRI were used to compare brain
volumes and segmented lateral ventricles. Automatically extracted volumes from
3D US show a high correlation and no statistically significant difference when
compared to ground truth measurements. Differences in volume ratios was 6.0 +/-
4.8% compared to MRI, while lateral ventricular segmentation yielded a mean
Dice coefficient of 70.8 +/- 3.6% and a mean absolute distance (MAD) of 0.88
+/- 0.2mm, demonstrating the clinical benefit of this tool in paediatric
ultrasound
A Deep Learning Approach to Denoise Optical Coherence Tomography Images of the Optic Nerve Head
Purpose: To develop a deep learning approach to de-noise optical coherence
tomography (OCT) B-scans of the optic nerve head (ONH).
Methods: Volume scans consisting of 97 horizontal B-scans were acquired
through the center of the ONH using a commercial OCT device (Spectralis) for
both eyes of 20 subjects. For each eye, single-frame (without signal
averaging), and multi-frame (75x signal averaging) volume scans were obtained.
A custom deep learning network was then designed and trained with 2,328 "clean
B-scans" (multi-frame B-scans), and their corresponding "noisy B-scans" (clean
B-scans + gaussian noise) to de-noise the single-frame B-scans. The performance
of the de-noising algorithm was assessed qualitatively, and quantitatively on
1,552 B-scans using the signal to noise ratio (SNR), contrast to noise ratio
(CNR), and mean structural similarity index metrics (MSSIM).
Results: The proposed algorithm successfully denoised unseen single-frame OCT
B-scans. The denoised B-scans were qualitatively similar to their corresponding
multi-frame B-scans, with enhanced visibility of the ONH tissues. The mean SNR
increased from dB (single-frame) to dB
(denoised). For all the ONH tissues, the mean CNR increased from (single-frame) to (denoised). The MSSIM increased from
(single frame) to (denoised) when compared with
the corresponding multi-frame B-scans.
Conclusions: Our deep learning algorithm can denoise a single-frame OCT
B-scan of the ONH in under 20 ms, thus offering a framework to obtain superior
quality OCT B-scans with reduced scanning times and minimal patient discomfort
2D Reconstruction of Small Intestine's Interior Wall
Examining and interpreting of a large number of wireless endoscopic images
from the gastrointestinal tract is a tiresome task for physicians. A practical
solution is to automatically construct a two dimensional representation of the
gastrointestinal tract for easy inspection. However, little has been done on
wireless endoscopic image stitching, let alone systematic investigation. The
proposed new wireless endoscopic image stitching method consists of two main
steps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of image registration. First, the
keypoints are extracted by Principle Component Analysis and Scale Invariant
Feature Transform (PCA-SIFT) algorithm and refined with Maximum Likelihood
Estimation SAmple Consensus (MLESAC) outlier removal to find the most reliable
keypoints. Second, the optimal transformation parameters obtained from first
step are fed to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) algorithm as an initial
solution. With modified Marquardt-Levenberg search strategy in a multiscale
framework, the NMI can find the optimal transformation parameters in the
shortest time. The proposed methodology has been tested on two different
datasets - one with real wireless endoscopic images and another with images
obtained from Micro-Ball (a new wireless cubic endoscopy system with six image
sensors). The results have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of the
proposed methodology both visually and quantitatively.Comment: Journal draf
Pediatric Bone Age Assessment Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Skeletal bone age assessment is a common clinical practice to diagnose
endocrine and metabolic disorders in child development. In this paper, we
describe a fully automated deep learning approach to the problem of bone age
assessment using data from Pediatric Bone Age Challenge organized by RSNA 2017.
The dataset for this competition is consisted of 12.6k radiological images of
left hand labeled by the bone age and sex of patients. Our approach utilizes
several deep learning architectures: U-Net, ResNet-50, and custom VGG-style
neural networks trained end-to-end. We use images of whole hands as well as
specific parts of a hand for both training and inference. This approach allows
us to measure importance of specific hand bones for the automated bone age
analysis. We further evaluate performance of the method in the context of
skeletal development stages. Our approach outperforms other common methods for
bone age assessment.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure
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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