Technical Note: Intensity-based quality assurance criteria for deformable image registration in image-guided radiotherapy

BACKGROUND: Deformable image registration is increasingly used in radiotherapy to adapt the treatment plan and accumulate the delivered dose. Consequently, clinical workflows using deformable image registration require quick and reliable quality assurance to accept registrations. Additionally, for online adaptive radiotherapy, quality assurance without the need for an operator to delineate contours while the patient is on the treatment table is needed. Established quality assurance criteria such as the Dice similarity coefficient or Hausdorff distance lack these qualities and also display a limited sensitivity to registration errors beyond soft tissue boundaries. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to investigate the existing intensity-based quality assurance criteria structural similarity and normalized mutual information for their ability to quickly and reliably identify registration errors for (online) adaptive radiotherapy and compare them to contour-based quality assurance criteria. METHODS: All criteria were tested using synthetic and simulated biomechanical deformations of 3D MR images as well as manually annotated 4D CT data. The quality assurance criteria were scored for classification performance, for their ability to predict the registration error, and for their spatial information. RESULTS: We found that besides being fast and operator-independent, the intensity-based criteria have the highest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and provide the best input for models to predict the registration error on all data sets. Structural similarity furthermore provides spatial information with a higher gamma pass rate of the predicted registration error than commonly used spatial quality assurance criteria. CONCLUSIONS: Intensity-based quality assurance criteria can provide the required confidence in decisions about using mono-modal registrations in clinical workflows. They thereby enable automated quality assurance for deformable image registration in adaptive radiotherapy treatments

Multiple common garden experiments suggest lack of local adaptation in an invasive ornamental plant

Aims: Adaptive evolution along geographic gradients of climatic conditions is suggested to facilitate the spread of invasive plant species, leading to clinal variation among populations in the introduced range. We investigated whether adaptation to climate is also involved in the invasive spread of an ornamental shrub, Buddleja davidii, across western and central Europe. Material and Methods: We combined a common garden experiment, replicated in three climatically different central European regions, with reciprocal transplantation to quantify genetic differentiation in growth and reproductive traits of 20 invasive B. davidii populations. Additionally, we compared compensatory regrowth among populations after clipping of stems to simulate mechanical damage. Important findings: Our results do not provide evidence for clinal variation among invasive B. davidii populations: populations responded similarly to the different environments, and trait values were not correlated to climatic conditions or geographic coordinates of their home sites. Moreover, we did not detect differences in the compensatory ability of populations. We suppose that the invasive spread of B. davidii has been facilitated by phenotypic plasticity rather than by adaptation to climate, and that continent-wide shuffling of cultivars due to horticultural trade may have limited local adaptation so far

Influence of different isoflurane anesthesia protocols on murine cerebral hemodynamics measured with pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling

Arterial spin labeling (ASL)-MRI can noninvasively map cerebral blood flow (CBF) and cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR), potential biomarkers of cognitive impairment and dementia. Mouse models of disease are frequently used in translational MRI studies, which are commonly performed under anesthesia. Understanding the influence of the specific anesthesia protocol used on the measured parameters is important for accurate interpretation of hemodynamic studies with mice. Isoflurane is a frequently used anesthetic with vasodilative properties. Here, the influence of three distinct isoflurane protocols was studied with pseudo-continuous ASL in two different mouse strains. The first protocol was a free-breathing set-up with medium concentrations, the second a free-breathing set-up with low induction and maintenance concentrations, and the third a set-up with medium concentrations and mechanical ventilation. A protocol with the vasoconstrictive anesthetic medetomidine was used as a comparison. As expected, medium isoflurane anesthesia resulted in significantly higher CBF and lower CVR values than medetomidine (median whole-brain CBF of 157.7 vs 84.4 mL/100 g/min and CVR of 0.54 vs 51.7% in C57BL/6 J mice). The other two isoflurane protocols lowered the CBF and increased the CVR values compared with medium isoflurane anesthesia, without obvious differences between them (median whole-brain CBF of 138.9 vs 131.7 mL/100 g/min and CVR of 10.0 vs 9.6%, in C57BL/6 J mice). Furthermore, CVR was shown to be dependent on baseline CBF, regardless of the anesthesia protocol used

Distinct Genetic Loci Control Plasma HIV-RNA and Cellular HIV-DNA Levels in HIV-1 Infection: The ANRS Genome Wide Association 01 Study

Previous studies of the HIV-1 disease have shown that HLA and Chemokine receptor genetic variants influence disease progression and early viral load. We performed a Genome Wide Association study in a cohort of 605 HIV-1-infected seroconverters for detection of novel genetic factors that influence plasma HIV-RNA and cellular HIV-DNA levels. Most of the SNPs strongly associated with HIV-RNA levels were localised in the 6p21 major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region and were in the vicinity of class I and III genes. Moreover, protective alleles for four disease-associated SNPs in the MHC locus (rs2395029, rs13199524, rs12198173 and rs3093662) were strikingly over-represented among forty-five Long Term HIV controllers. Furthermore, we show that the HIV-DNA levels (reflecting the HIV reservoir) are associated with the same four SNPs, but also with two additional SNPs on chromosome 17 (rs6503919; intergenic region flanked by the DDX40 and YPEL2 genes) and chromosome 8 (rs2575735; within the Syndecan 2 gene). Our data provide evidence that the MHC controls both HIV replication and HIV reservoir. They also indicate that two additional genomic loci may influence the HIV reservoir

EVolution : an edge-based variational method for non-rigid multi-modal image registration

Image registration is part of a large variety of medical applications including diagnosis, monitoring disease progression and/or treatment effectiveness and, more recently, therapy guidance. Such applications usually involve several imaging modalities such as ultrasound, computed tomography, positron emission tomography, x-ray or magnetic resonance imaging, either separately or combined. In the current work, we propose a non-rigid multi-modal registration method (namely EVolution: an edge-based variational method for non-rigid multi-modal image registration) that aims at maximizing edge alignment between the images being registered. The proposed algorithm requires only contrasts between physiological tissues, preferably present in both image modalities, and assumes deformable/elastic tissues. Given both is shown to be well suitable for non-rigid co-registration across different image types/contrasts (T1/T2) as well as different modalities (CT/MRI). This is achieved using a variational scheme that provides a fast algorithm with a low number of control parameters. Results obtained on an annotated CT data set were comparable to the ones provided by state-of-the-art multi-modal image registration algorithms, for all tested experimental conditions (image pre-filtering, image intensity variation, noise perturbation). Moreover, we demonstrate that, compared to existing approaches, our method possesses increased robustness to transient structures (i.e. that are only present in some of the images)

Real-Time Artefact Corrections For Quantitative MR Temperature Mapping

International audienc

Real-Time Artefact Corrections For Quantitative MR Temperature Mapping

International audienc