2,296 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
Automatic segmentation of MR brain images with a convolutional neural network
Automatic segmentation in MR brain images is important for quantitative
analysis in large-scale studies with images acquired at all ages.
This paper presents a method for the automatic segmentation of MR brain
images into a number of tissue classes using a convolutional neural network. To
ensure that the method obtains accurate segmentation details as well as spatial
consistency, the network uses multiple patch sizes and multiple convolution
kernel sizes to acquire multi-scale information about each voxel. The method is
not dependent on explicit features, but learns to recognise the information
that is important for the classification based on training data. The method
requires a single anatomical MR image only.
The segmentation method is applied to five different data sets: coronal
T2-weighted images of preterm infants acquired at 30 weeks postmenstrual age
(PMA) and 40 weeks PMA, axial T2- weighted images of preterm infants acquired
at 40 weeks PMA, axial T1-weighted images of ageing adults acquired at an
average age of 70 years, and T1-weighted images of young adults acquired at an
average age of 23 years. The method obtained the following average Dice
coefficients over all segmented tissue classes for each data set, respectively:
0.87, 0.82, 0.84, 0.86 and 0.91.
The results demonstrate that the method obtains accurate segmentations in all
five sets, and hence demonstrates its robustness to differences in age and
acquisition protocol
Automated detection of brain abnormalities in neonatal hypoxia ischemic injury from MR images.
We compared the efficacy of three automated brain injury detection methods, namely symmetry-integrated region growing (SIRG), hierarchical region splitting (HRS) and modified watershed segmentation (MWS) in human and animal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets for the detection of hypoxic ischemic injuries (HIIs). Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI, 1.5T) data from neonatal arterial ischemic stroke (AIS) patients, as well as T2-weighted imaging (T2WI, 11.7T, 4.7T) at seven different time-points (1, 4, 7, 10, 17, 24 and 31 days post HII) in rat-pup model of hypoxic ischemic injury were used to assess the temporal efficacy of our computational approaches. Sensitivity, specificity, and similarity were used as performance metrics based on manual ('gold standard') injury detection to quantify comparisons. When compared to the manual gold standard, automated injury location results from SIRG performed the best in 62% of the data, while 29% for HRS and 9% for MWS. Injury severity detection revealed that SIRG performed the best in 67% cases while 33% for HRS. Prior information is required by HRS and MWS, but not by SIRG. However, SIRG is sensitive to parameter-tuning, while HRS and MWS are not. Among these methods, SIRG performs the best in detecting lesion volumes; HRS is the most robust, while MWS lags behind in both respects
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