3,300 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
An Unsupervised Learning Model for Deformable Medical Image Registration
We present a fast learning-based algorithm for deformable, pairwise 3D
medical image registration. Current registration methods optimize an objective
function independently for each pair of images, which can be time-consuming for
large data. We define registration as a parametric function, and optimize its
parameters given a set of images from a collection of interest. Given a new
pair of scans, we can quickly compute a registration field by directly
evaluating the function using the learned parameters. We model this function
using a convolutional neural network (CNN), and use a spatial transform layer
to reconstruct one image from another while imposing smoothness constraints on
the registration field. The proposed method does not require supervised
information such as ground truth registration fields or anatomical landmarks.
We demonstrate registration accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art 3D image
registration, while operating orders of magnitude faster in practice. Our
method promises to significantly speed up medical image analysis and processing
pipelines, while facilitating novel directions in learning-based registration
and its applications. Our code is available at
https://github.com/balakg/voxelmorph .Comment: 9 pages, in CVPR 201
- …