Learning Myelin Content in Multiple Sclerosis from Multimodal MRI through Adversarial Training

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). A reliable measure of the tissue myelin content is therefore essential for the understanding of the physiopathology of MS, tracking progression and assessing treatment efficacy. Positron emission tomography (PET) with [^{11} \mbox{C}] \mbox{PIB} has been proposed as a promising biomarker for measuring myelin content changes in-vivo in MS. However, PET imaging is expensive and invasive due to the injection of a radioactive tracer. On the contrary, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive, widely available technique, but existing MRI sequences do not provide, to date, a reliable, specific, or direct marker of either demyelination or remyelination. In this work, we therefore propose Sketcher-Refiner Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with specifically designed adversarial loss functions to predict the PET-derived myelin content map from a combination of MRI modalities. The prediction problem is solved by a sketch-refinement process in which the sketcher generates the preliminary anatomical and physiological information and the refiner refines and generates images reflecting the tissue myelin content in the human brain. We evaluated the ability of our method to predict myelin content at both global and voxel-wise levels. The evaluation results show that the demyelination in lesion regions and myelin content in normal-appearing white matter (NAWM) can be well predicted by our method. The method has the potential to become a useful tool for clinical management of patients with MS.Comment: Accepted by MICCAI201

Applications of Deep Learning Techniques for Automated Multiple Sclerosis Detection Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Review

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a type of brain disease which causes visual, sensory, and motor problems for people with a detrimental effect on the functioning of the nervous system. In order to diagnose MS, multiple screening methods have been proposed so far; among them, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has received considerable attention among physicians. MRI modalities provide physicians with fundamental information about the structure and function of the brain, which is crucial for the rapid diagnosis of MS lesions. Diagnosing MS using MRI is time-consuming, tedious, and prone to manual errors. Research on the implementation of computer aided diagnosis system (CADS) based on artificial intelligence (AI) to diagnose MS involves conventional machine learning and deep learning (DL) methods. In conventional machine learning, feature extraction, feature selection, and classification steps are carried out by using trial and error; on the contrary, these steps in DL are based on deep layers whose values are automatically learn. In this paper, a complete review of automated MS diagnosis methods performed using DL techniques with MRI neuroimaging modalities is provided. Initially, the steps involved in various CADS proposed using MRI modalities and DL techniques for MS diagnosis are investigated. The important preprocessing techniques employed in various works are analyzed. Most of the published papers on MS diagnosis using MRI modalities and DL are presented. The most significant challenges facing and future direction of automated diagnosis of MS using MRI modalities and DL techniques are also provided

Interpretable and reliable artificial intelligence systems for brain diseases

International audienceIn artificial intelligence for medicine, more interpretable and reliable systems are needed. Here, we report on recent advances toward these aims in the field of brain diseases

Deep learning based domain adaptation for mitochondria segmentation on EM volumes.

[EN] BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Accurate segmentation of electron microscopy (EM) volumes of the brain is essential to characterize neuronal structures at a cell or organelle level. While supervised deep learning methods have led to major breakthroughs in that direction during the past years, they usually require large amounts of annotated data to be trained, and perform poorly on other data acquired under similar experimental and imaging conditions. This is a problem known as domain adaptation, since models that learned from a sample distribution (or source domain) struggle to maintain their performance on samples extracted from a different distribution or target domain. In this work, we address the complex case of deep learning based domain adaptation for mitochondria segmentation across EM datasets from different tissues and species. METHODS: We present three unsupervised domain adaptation strategies to improve mitochondria segmentation in the target domain based on (1) state-of-the-art style transfer between images of both domains; (2) self-supervised learning to pre-train a model using unlabeled source and target images, and then fine-tune it only with the source labels; and (3) multi-task neural network architectures trained end-to-end with both labeled and unlabeled images. Additionally, to ensure good generalization in our models, we propose a new training stopping criterion based on morphological priors obtained exclusively in the source domain. The code and its documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/danifranco/EM_domain_adaptation. RESULTS: We carried out all possible cross-dataset experiments using three publicly available EM datasets. We evaluated our proposed strategies and those of others based on the mitochondria semantic labels predicted on the target datasets. CONCLUSIONS: The methods introduced here outperform the baseline methods and compare favorably to the state of the art. In the absence of validation labels, monitoring our proposed morphology-based metric is an intuitive and effective way to stop the training process and select in average optimal models.I. Arganda-Carreras would like to acknowledge the support of the 2020 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation. This work is supported in part by the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU grant GIU19/027 and by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, under grant PID2019-109820RB-I00, MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033/, cofinanced by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), “A way of making Europe.