Groupwise Non-Rigid Registration with Deep Learning: An Affordable Solution Applied to 2D Cardiac Cine MRI Reconstruction

Groupwise image (GW) registration is customarily used for subsequent processing in medical imaging. However, it is computationally expensive due to repeated calculation of transformations and gradients. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) architecture that achieves GW elastic registration of a 2D dynamic sequence on an affordable average GPU. Our solution, referred to as dGW, is a simplified version of the well-known U-net. In our GW solution, the image that the other images are registered to, referred to in the paper as template image, is iteratively obtained together with the registered images. Design and evaluation have been carried out using 2D cine cardiac MR slices from 2 databases respectively consisting of 89 and 41 subjects. The first database was used for training and validation with 66.6–33.3% split. The second one was used for validation (50%) and testing (50%). Additional network hyperparameters, which are—in essence—those that control the transformation smoothness degree, are obtained by means of a forward selection procedure. Our results show a 9-fold runtime reduction with respect to an optimization-based implementation; in addition, making use of the well-known structural similarity (SSIM) index we have obtained significative differences with dGW with respect to an alternative DL solution based on Voxelmorph

Insight into ADHD diagnosis with deep learning on Actimetry: Quantitative interpretation of occlusion maps in age and gender subgroups

Producción CientíficaAttention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder in childhood that often persists into adulthood. Objectively diagnosing ADHD can be challenging due to the reliance on subjective questionnaires in clinical assessment. Fortunately, recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have shown promise in providing objective diagnoses through the analysis of medical images or activity recordings. These AI-based techniques have demonstrated accurate ADHD diagnosis; however, the growing complexity of deep learning models has introduced a lack of interpretability. These models often function as black boxes, unable to offer meaningful insights into the data patterns that characterize ADHD.Agencia Estatal de Investigación (grants PID2020-115339RB-I00, TED2021-130090B-I00 and TED2021-131536B-I00)EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement (101008297)Company ESAOTE Ltd (grant 18IQBM

Convolution-based free-form deformation for multimodal groupwise registration

Producción CientíficaRecently, an efficient implementation of convolution-based free form deformations (FFD) has been proposed for both groupwise 3D monomodal and 2D pairwise multimodal registrations. However, there is still an unmet need in the field for groupwise -D multimodal registration with L > 2. In this correspondence, we address this need and present a solution for achieving accurate registration using two popular metrics: Renyi entropy and PCA2.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (TEC2017-82408-R and PID2020-115339RB-I00)ESAOTE Ltd. (18IQBM

Efficient convolution-based pairwise elastic image registration on three multimodal similarity metrics

Producción CientíficaThis paper proposes a complete convolutional formulation for 2D multimodal pairwise image registration problems based on free-form deformations. We have reformulated in terms of discrete 1D convolutions the evaluation of spatial transformations, the regularization term, and their gradients for three different multimodal registration metrics, namely, normalized cross correlation, mutual information, and normalized mutual information. A sufficient condition on the metric gradient is provided for further extension to other metrics. The proposed approach has been tested, as a proof of concept, on contrast-enhanced first-pass perfusion cardiac magnetic resonance images. Execution times have been compared with the corresponding execution times of the classical tensor product formulation, both on CPU and GPU. The speed-up achieved by using convolutions instead of tensor products depends on the image size and the number of control points considered, the larger those magnitudes, the greater the execution time reduction. Furthermore, the speed-up will be more significant when gradient operations constitute the major bottleneck in the optimization process.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (grants TEC2017-82408-R and PID2020-115339RB-I00)ESAOTE Ltd (grant 18IQBM

Fast 4D elastic group-wise image registration. Convolutional interpolation revisited

Background and Objective:This paper proposes a new and highly efficient implementation of 3D+t groupwise registration based on the free-form deformation paradigm. Methods:Deformation is posed as a cascade of 1D convolutions, achieving great reduction in execution time for evaluation of transformations and gradients. Results:The proposed method has been applied to 4D cardiac MRI and 4D thoracic CT monomodal datasets. Results show an average runtime reduction above 90%, both in CPU and GPU executions, compared with the classical tensor product formulation. Conclusions:Our implementation, although fully developed for the metric sum of squared differences, can be extended to other metrics and its adaptation to multiresolution strategies is straightforward. Therefore, it can be extremely useful to speed up image registration procedures in different applications where high dimensional data are involved.MEC-TEC2017-82408-

Group-Slicer: A collaborative extension of 3D-Slicer

AbstractIn this paper, we describe a first step towards a collaborative extension of the well-known 3D-Slicer; this platform is nowadays used as a standalone tool for both surgical planning and medical intervention. We show how this tool can be easily modified to make it collaborative so that it may constitute an integrated environment for expertise exchange as well as a useful tool for academic purposes