5,516 research outputs found
High-Performance Motion Correction of Fetal MRI
Fetal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) shows promising results for pre-natal diagnostics. The detection of potentially lifethreatening abnormalities in the fetus can be difficult with ultrasound alone. MRI is one of the few safe alternative imaging modalities in pregnancy. However, to date it has been limited by unpredictable fetal and maternal motion during acquisition. Motion between the acquisitions of individual slices of a 3D volume results in spatial inconsistencies that can be resolved by slice-to-volume reconstruction (SVR) methods to provide high quality 3D image data. Existing algorithms to solve this problem have evolved from very slow implementations targeting a single organ to general high-performance solutions to reconstruct the whole uterus. In this paper we give a brief overview over the current state-of-the art in fetal motion compensation methods and show currently emerging clinical applications of these technique
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
Predicting Slice-to-Volume Transformation in Presence of Arbitrary Subject Motion
This paper aims to solve a fundamental problem in intensity-based 2D/3D
registration, which concerns the limited capture range and need for very good
initialization of state-of-the-art image registration methods. We propose a
regression approach that learns to predict rotation and translations of
arbitrary 2D image slices from 3D volumes, with respect to a learned canonical
atlas co-ordinate system. To this end, we utilize Convolutional Neural Networks
(CNNs) to learn the highly complex regression function that maps 2D image
slices into their correct position and orientation in 3D space. Our approach is
attractive in challenging imaging scenarios, where significant subject motion
complicates reconstruction performance of 3D volumes from 2D slice data. We
extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our approach quantitatively on
simulated MRI brain data with extreme random motion. We further demonstrate
qualitative results on fetal MRI where our method is integrated into a full
reconstruction and motion compensation pipeline. With our CNN regression
approach we obtain an average prediction error of 7mm on simulated data, and
convincing reconstruction quality of images of very young fetuses where
previous methods fail. We further discuss applications to Computed Tomography
and X-ray projections. Our approach is a general solution to the 2D/3D
initialization problem. It is computationally efficient, with prediction times
per slice of a few milliseconds, making it suitable for real-time scenarios.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 6 pages supplemental material, currently under
review for MICCAI 201
Fetal MRI : an essential step in interpreting complex ultrasound findings
Background: Fetal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows for the interpretation of complex fetal anomalies detected on ultrasound (US). Locally it has been available since 2013 but has remained underused.
Method: In this paper we report the US and MRI findings of all cases of fetal MRI that were taken to date locally and how MRI can contribute to the clarification of malformations, management, counseling, evaluation of prognosis and ruling out of other possible malformations.
Results: The cases reported were: two cases of hydroureter; gastroschisis; ventriculomegaly; intracranial haemorrhage; splenic cyst; Arnold Chiari II malformation. In all seven cases MRI was able to add to or change the diagnosis.
Conclusion: Fetal MRI acts as an adjunct to US in interpreting abnormal fetal development. It is a safe non-invasive method of imaging that allows the clinician to take more informed decisions and better parental counselling.peer-reviewe
Interactive Medical Image Segmentation using Deep Learning with Image-specific Fine-tuning
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art
performance for automatic medical image segmentation. However, they have not
demonstrated sufficiently accurate and robust results for clinical use. In
addition, they are limited by the lack of image-specific adaptation and the
lack of generalizability to previously unseen object classes. To address these
problems, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for interactive
segmentation by incorporating CNNs into a bounding box and scribble-based
segmentation pipeline. We propose image-specific fine-tuning to make a CNN
model adaptive to a specific test image, which can be either unsupervised
(without additional user interactions) or supervised (with additional
scribbles). We also propose a weighted loss function considering network and
interaction-based uncertainty for the fine-tuning. We applied this framework to
two applications: 2D segmentation of multiple organs from fetal MR slices,
where only two types of these organs were annotated for training; and 3D
segmentation of brain tumor core (excluding edema) and whole brain tumor
(including edema) from different MR sequences, where only tumor cores in one MR
sequence were annotated for training. Experimental results show that 1) our
model is more robust to segment previously unseen objects than state-of-the-art
CNNs; 2) image-specific fine-tuning with the proposed weighted loss function
significantly improves segmentation accuracy; and 3) our method leads to
accurate results with fewer user interactions and less user time than
traditional interactive segmentation methods.Comment: 11 pages, 11 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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