QUANTITATIVE NUCLEAR MEDICINE IMAGING USING ADVANCED IMAGE RECONSTRUCTION AND RADIOMICS

Our aim is to help put nuclear medicine at the forefront of quantitation on the path to the realization of personalized medicine. We propose and evaluate (Part I) advanced image reconstruction and (Part II) robust radiomics (large-scale data-oriented study of radiological images). The goal is to attain significantly improved diagnostic, prognostic and treatment-response assessment capabilities. Part I presents a new paradigm in point-spread function (PSF)-modeling, a partial volume correction method in PET imaging where resolution-degrading phenomena are modeled within the reconstruction framework. PSF-modeling improves resolution and enhances contrast, but significantly alters noise properties and induces edge-overshoots. Past efforts involve a dichotomy of PSF vs. no-PSF modeling; by contrast, we focus on a wide-spectrum of PSF models, including under- and over-estimation of the true PSF, for the potential of enhanced quantitation in standardized uptake values (SUVs). We show for the standard range of iterations employed in clinic (not excessive), edge enhancement due to overestimation actually lower SUV bias in small regions, while inter-voxel correlations suppress image roughness and enhance uniformity. An overestimated PSF yields improved contrast and limited edge-overshoot effects at lower iterations, enabling enhanced SUV quantitation. Overall, our framework provides an effective venue for quantitative task-based optimization. Part II proposes robust and reproducible radiomics methods. Radiomics workflows are complex, generating hundreds of features, which can lead to high variability and overfitting, and ultimately hampering performance. We developed and released a Standardized Environment for Radiomics Analysis (SERA) solution to enable robust radiomics analyses. We conduct studies on two unique imaging datasets – renal cell carcinoma SPECT and prostate cancer PET – identifying robust and reproducible radiomic features. In addition, we evaluate a novel hypothesis that radiomic features extracted from clinically normal (non-ischemic) myocardial perfusion SPECT (MPS) can predict coronary artery calcification (CAC; as extracted from CT). This has important implications, since CAC assessment is not commonly-performed nor reimbursed in wide community settings. SERA-derived radiomic features were utilized in a multi-step feature selection framework, followed by the application of machine learning to radiomic features. Our results show the potential to predict CAC from normal MPS, suggesting added usage and value for routine standard MPS

Discrete Artificial Bee Colony for Computationally Efficient Symbol Detection in Multidevice STBC MIMO Systems

A Discrete Artificial Bee Colony (DABC) is presented for joint symbol detection at the receiver in a multidevice Space-Time Block Code (STBC) Mutli-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) communication system. Exhaustive search (maximum likelihood detection) for finding an optimal detection has a computational complexity that increases exponentially with the number of mobile devices, transmit antennas per mobile device, and the number of bits per symbol. ABC is a new population-based, swarm-based Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) presented for multivariable numerical functions and has shown good performance compared to other mainstream EAs for problems in continuous domain. This algorithm simulates the intelligent foraging behavior of honeybee swarms. An enhanced discrete version of the ABC algorithm is presented and applied to the joint symbol detection problem to find a nearly optimal solution in real time. The results of multiple independent simulation runs indicate the effectiveness of DABC with other well-known algorithms previously proposed for joint symbol detection such as the near-optimal sphere decoding, minimum mean square error, zero forcing, and semidefinite relaxation, along with other EAs such as genetic algorithm, estimation of distributions algorithm, and the more novel biogeography-based optimization algorithm

Standardized radiomics analysis of clinical myocardial perfusion stress SPECT images to identify coronary artery calcification

PURPOSE: Myocardial perfusion (MP) stress single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is an established diagnostic test for patients suspected of coronary artery disease (CAD). Meanwhile, coronary artery calcification (CAC) scoring obtained from diagnostic CT is a highly sensitive test, offering incremental diagnostic information in identifying patients with significant CAD yet normal MP stress SPECT (MPSS) scans. However, after decades of wide utilization of MPSS, CAC is not commonly reimbursed (e.g. by the CMS), nor widely deployed in community settings. We studied the potential of complementary information deduced from the radiomics analysis of normal MPSS scans in predicting the CAC score. METHODS: We collected data from 428 patients with normal (non-ischemic) MPSS ( RESULTS: Unsupervised feature selection significantly reduced 8×487 features to 56. In univariate analysis, no feature survived the false-discovery rate (FDR) to directly correlate with CAC scores. Applying Fisher\u27s method to the multivariate regression results demonstrated combining radiomics with the clinical features to enhance the significance of the prediction model across all cardiac segments. Conclusions: Our standardized and statistically robust multivariate analysis demonstrated significant prediction of the CAC score for all cardiac segments when combining MPSS radiomic features with clinical features, suggesting radiomics analysis can add diagnostic or prognostic value to standard MPSS for wide clinical usage

Novel ABC- and BBO-Based Evolutionary Algorithms and Their Illustrations to Wireless Communications

In this thesis we discuss some new Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) as potential low-complex solvers to some optimization problems in wireless communications. Delivering high performance results while maintaining low computational complexity is extremely important in solving complex optimization problems or problems with a large search space. We propose our enhancements to Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithms. We further present a novel high performance low-complex EA for optimization problems in both continuous and discrete domains, that combines the advantages of both BBO and ABC algorithms, which is referred to as the Hybrid ABC/BBO algorithm. This algorithm has shown higher performance in comparison to other EAs when applied to some optimization problems. We applied these algorithms to a single-objective unconstrained optimization problem (Multi Device STBC-MIMO), a single-objective constrained optimization problem (relay assignment in cognitive radio systems), and a multi-objective constrained optimization problem (Green Resource Allocation in cognitive radio systems). We provide the formulation of these problems and compared the hybrid algorithm results with exhaustive search (where applicable), and further demonstrate the superiority of the hybrid algorithm in terms of complexity and performance over ABC, BBO, other mainstream EAs and optimization solvers through simulations

QUANTITATIVE NUCLEAR MEDICINE IMAGING USING ADVANCED IMAGE RECONSTRUCTION AND RADIOMICS

Our aim is to help put nuclear medicine at the forefront of quantitation on the path to the realization of personalized medicine. We propose and evaluate (Part I) advanced image reconstruction and (Part II) robust radiomics (large-scale data-oriented study of radiological images). The goal is to attain significantly improved diagnostic, prognostic and treatment-response assessment capabilities. Part I presents a new paradigm in point-spread function (PSF)-modeling, a partial volume correction method in PET imaging where resolution-degrading phenomena are modeled within the reconstruction framework. PSF-modeling improves resolution and enhances contrast, but significantly alters noise properties and induces edge-overshoots. Past efforts involve a dichotomy of PSF vs. no-PSF modeling; by contrast, we focus on a wide-spectrum of PSF models, including under- and over-estimation of the true PSF, for the potential of enhanced quantitation in standardized uptake values (SUVs). We show for the standard range of iterations employed in clinic (not excessive), edge enhancement due to overestimation actually lower SUV bias in small regions, while inter-voxel correlations suppress image roughness and enhance uniformity. An overestimated PSF yields improved contrast and limited edge-overshoot effects at lower iterations, enabling enhanced SUV quantitation. Overall, our framework provides an effective venue for quantitative task-based optimization. Part II proposes robust and reproducible radiomics methods. Radiomics workflows are complex, generating hundreds of features, which can lead to high variability and overfitting, and ultimately hampering performance. We developed and released a Standardized Environment for Radiomics Analysis (SERA) solution to enable robust radiomics analyses. We conduct studies on two unique imaging datasets – renal cell carcinoma SPECT and prostate cancer PET – identifying robust and reproducible radiomic features. In addition, we evaluate a novel hypothesis that radiomic features extracted from clinically normal (non-ischemic) myocardial perfusion SPECT (MPS) can predict coronary artery calcification (CAC; as extracted from CT). This has important implications, since CAC assessment is not commonly-performed nor reimbursed in wide community settings. SERA-derived radiomic features were utilized in a multi-step feature selection framework, followed by the application of machine learning to radiomic features. Our results show the potential to predict CAC from normal MPS, suggesting added usage and value for routine standard MPS

Comparative evaluation of neonatal and obstetrics outcomes of labour between Iranian and Afghan ethnicities

Introduction: There are major differences in neonatal and obstetrics outcomes of labour among different ethnicities. The present study compared the neonatal and obstetrics outcomes of labour between the Iranian and Afghan ethnicities. Methods: Neonatal and obstetrics problems were evaluated in Iranian and Afghan pregnant women, who had referred to Arash Educational/Treatment Center for labour during a year. Results: 3020 (93.7%) Iranian and 202 (63%) Afghan women were evaluated. There were no significant differences between the two ethnicities in relation to a need for Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the rate of live births, infant birth weight, congenital anomalies and premature births (P>0.05). The rate of Caesarian section was higher in Iranian women (P=0.001). Conclusion: It seems that the differences in neonatal problems and outcomes of labour obstetrics between Iranians and Afghans can be attributed to different cultural, economic, and social conditions in comparison to different ethnicities

Deep learning and radiomics framework for PSMA-RADS classification of prostate cancer on PSMA PET

Abstract Background Accurate classification of sites of interest on prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron emission tomography (PET) images is an important diagnostic requirement for the differentiation of prostate cancer (PCa) from foci of physiologic uptake. We developed a deep learning and radiomics framework to perform lesion-level and patient-level classification on PSMA PET images of patients with PCa. Methods This was an IRB-approved, HIPAA-compliant, retrospective study. Lesions on [18F]DCFPyL PET/CT scans were assigned to PSMA reporting and data system (PSMA-RADS) categories and randomly partitioned into training, validation, and test sets. The framework extracted image features, radiomic features, and tissue type information from a cropped PET image slice containing a lesion and performed PSMA-RADS and PCa classification. Performance was evaluated by assessing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). A t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) analysis was performed. Confidence and probability scores were measured. Statistical significance was determined using a two-tailed t test. Results PSMA PET scans from 267 men with PCa had 3794 lesions assigned to PSMA-RADS categories. The framework yielded AUROC values of 0.87 and 0.90 for lesion-level and patient-level PSMA-RADS classification, respectively, on the test set. The framework yielded AUROC values of 0.92 and 0.85 for lesion-level and patient-level PCa classification, respectively, on the test set. A t-SNE analysis revealed learned relationships between the PSMA-RADS categories and disease findings. Mean confidence scores reflected the expected accuracy and were significantly higher for correct predictions than for incorrect predictions (P < 0.05). Measured probability scores reflected the likelihood of PCa consistent with the PSMA-RADS framework. Conclusion The framework provided lesion-level and patient-level PSMA-RADS and PCa classification on PSMA PET images. The framework was interpretable and provided confidence and probability scores that may assist physicians in making more informed clinical decisions