7,470 research outputs found
Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks
Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging
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
AutoFuse: Automatic Fusion Networks for Deformable Medical Image Registration
Deformable image registration aims to find a dense non-linear spatial
correspondence between a pair of images, which is a crucial step for many
medical tasks such as tumor growth monitoring and population analysis.
Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely recognized for their
ability to perform fast end-to-end registration. However, DNN-based
registration needs to explore the spatial information of each image and fuse
this information to characterize spatial correspondence. This raises an
essential question: what is the optimal fusion strategy to characterize spatial
correspondence? Existing fusion strategies (e.g., early fusion, late fusion)
were empirically designed to fuse information by manually defined prior
knowledge, which inevitably constrains the registration performance within the
limits of empirical designs. In this study, we depart from existing
empirically-designed fusion strategies and develop a data-driven fusion
strategy for deformable image registration. To achieve this, we propose an
Automatic Fusion network (AutoFuse) that provides flexibility to fuse
information at many potential locations within the network. A Fusion Gate (FG)
module is also proposed to control how to fuse information at each potential
network location based on training data. Our AutoFuse can automatically
optimize its fusion strategy during training and can be generalizable to both
unsupervised registration (without any labels) and semi-supervised registration
(with weak labels provided for partial training data). Extensive experiments on
two well-benchmarked medical registration tasks (inter- and intra-patient
registration) with eight public datasets show that our AutoFuse outperforms
state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised registration methods.Comment: Under Revie
Medical image registration using unsupervised deep neural network: A scoping literature review
In medicine, image registration is vital in image-guided interventions and
other clinical applications. However, it is a difficult subject to be addressed
which by the advent of machine learning, there have been considerable progress
in algorithmic performance has recently been achieved for medical image
registration in this area. The implementation of deep neural networks provides
an opportunity for some medical applications such as conducting image
registration in less time with high accuracy, playing a key role in countering
tumors during the operation. The current study presents a comprehensive scoping
review on the state-of-the-art literature of medical image registration studies
based on unsupervised deep neural networks is conducted, encompassing all the
related studies published in this field to this date. Here, we have tried to
summarize the latest developments and applications of unsupervised deep
learning-based registration methods in the medical field. Fundamental and main
concepts, techniques, statistical analysis from different viewpoints,
novelties, and future directions are elaborately discussed and conveyed in the
current comprehensive scoping review. Besides, this review hopes to help those
active readers, who are riveted by this field, achieve deep insight into this
exciting field
- …