531 research outputs found
Reducing variability in along-tract analysis with diffusion profile realignment
Diffusion weighted MRI (dMRI) provides a non invasive virtual reconstruction
of the brain's white matter structures through tractography. Analyzing dMRI
measures along the trajectory of white matter bundles can provide a more
specific investigation than considering a region of interest or tract-averaged
measurements. However, performing group analyses with this along-tract strategy
requires correspondence between points of tract pathways across subjects. This
is usually achieved by creating a new common space where the representative
streamlines from every subject are resampled to the same number of points. If
the underlying anatomy of some subjects was altered due to, e.g. disease or
developmental changes, such information might be lost by resampling to a fixed
number of points. In this work, we propose to address the issue of possible
misalignment, which might be present even after resampling, by realigning the
representative streamline of each subject in this 1D space with a new method,
coined diffusion profile realignment (DPR). Experiments on synthetic datasets
show that DPR reduces the coefficient of variation for the mean diffusivity,
fractional anisotropy and apparent fiber density when compared to the unaligned
case. Using 100 in vivo datasets from the HCP, we simulated changes in mean
diffusivity, fractional anisotropy and apparent fiber density. Pairwise
Student's t-tests between these altered subjects and the original subjects
indicate that regional changes are identified after realignment with the DPR
algorithm, while preserving differences previously detected in the unaligned
case. This new correction strategy contributes to revealing effects of interest
which might be hidden by misalignment and has the potential to improve the
specificity in longitudinal population studies beyond the traditional region of
interest based analysis and along-tract analysis workflows.Comment: v4: peer-reviewed round 2 v3 : deleted some old text from before
peer-review which was mistakenly included v2 : peer-reviewed version v1:
preprint as submitted to journal NeuroImag
Automatic Segmentation and Disease Classification Using Cardiac Cine MR Images
Segmentation of the heart in cardiac cine MR is clinically used to quantify
cardiac function. We propose a fully automatic method for segmentation and
disease classification using cardiac cine MR images. A convolutional neural
network (CNN) was designed to simultaneously segment the left ventricle (LV),
right ventricle (RV) and myocardium in end-diastole (ED) and end-systole (ES)
images. Features derived from the obtained segmentations were used in a Random
Forest classifier to label patients as suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy,
hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, heart failure following myocardial infarction,
right ventricular abnormality, or no cardiac disease. The method was developed
and evaluated using a balanced dataset containing images of 100 patients, which
was provided in the MICCAI 2017 automated cardiac diagnosis challenge (ACDC).
The segmentation and classification pipeline were evaluated in a four-fold
stratified cross-validation. Average Dice scores between reference and
automatically obtained segmentations were 0.94, 0.88 and 0.87 for the LV, RV
and myocardium. The classifier assigned 91% of patients to the correct disease
category. Segmentation and disease classification took 5 s per patient. The
results of our study suggest that image-based diagnosis using cine MR cardiac
scans can be performed automatically with high accuracy.Comment: Accepted in STACOM Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge 201
Harmonization of diffusion MRI datasets with adaptive dictionary learning
Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging is a noninvasive imaging technique that
can indirectly infer the microstructure of tissues and provide metrics which
are subject to normal variability across subjects. Potentially abnormal values
or features may yield essential information to support analysis of controls and
patients cohorts, but subtle confounds affecting diffusion MRI, such as those
due to difference in scanning protocols or hardware, can lead to systematic
errors which could be mistaken for purely biologically driven variations
amongst subjects. In this work, we propose a new harmonization algorithm based
on adaptive dictionary learning to mitigate the unwanted variability caused by
different scanner hardware while preserving the natural biological variability
present in the data. Overcomplete dictionaries, which are learned automatically
from the data and do not require paired samples, are then used to reconstruct
the data from a different scanner, removing variability present in the source
scanner in the process. We use the publicly available database from an
international challenge to evaluate the method, which was acquired on three
different scanners and with two different protocols, and propose a new mapping
towards a scanner-agnostic space. Results show that the effect size of the four
studied diffusion metrics is preserved while removing variability attributable
to the scanner. Experiments with alterations using a free water compartment,
which is not simulated in the training data, shows that the effect size induced
by the alterations is also preserved after harmonization. The algorithm is
freely available and could help multicenter studies in pooling their data,
while removing scanner specific confounds, and increase statistical power in
the process.Comment: v5 Peer review for Human Brain Mapping v4: Peer review round 2 v3:
Peer reviewed version v2: Fix minor text issue + add supp materials v1: To be
submitted to Neuroimag
Coronary Artery Centerline Extraction in Cardiac CT Angiography Using a CNN-Based Orientation Classifier
Coronary artery centerline extraction in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) images
is a prerequisite for evaluation of stenoses and atherosclerotic plaque. We
propose an algorithm that extracts coronary artery centerlines in CCTA using a
convolutional neural network (CNN).
A 3D dilated CNN is trained to predict the most likely direction and radius
of an artery at any given point in a CCTA image based on a local image patch.
Starting from a single seed point placed manually or automatically anywhere in
a coronary artery, a tracker follows the vessel centerline in two directions
using the predictions of the CNN. Tracking is terminated when no direction can
be identified with high certainty.
The CNN was trained using 32 manually annotated centerlines in a training set
consisting of 8 CCTA images provided in the MICCAI 2008 Coronary Artery
Tracking Challenge (CAT08). Evaluation using 24 test images of the CAT08
challenge showed that extracted centerlines had an average overlap of 93.7%
with 96 manually annotated reference centerlines. Extracted centerline points
were highly accurate, with an average distance of 0.21 mm to reference
centerline points. In a second test set consisting of 50 CCTA scans, 5,448
markers in the coronary arteries were used as seed points to extract single
centerlines. This showed strong correspondence between extracted centerlines
and manually placed markers. In a third test set containing 36 CCTA scans,
fully automatic seeding and centerline extraction led to extraction of on
average 92% of clinically relevant coronary artery segments.
The proposed method is able to accurately and efficiently determine the
direction and radius of coronary arteries. The method can be trained with
limited training data, and once trained allows fast automatic or interactive
extraction of coronary artery trees from CCTA images.Comment: Accepted in Medical Image Analysi
A Deep Learning Framework for Unsupervised Affine and Deformable Image Registration
Image registration, the process of aligning two or more images, is the core
technique of many (semi-)automatic medical image analysis tasks. Recent studies
have shown that deep learning methods, notably convolutional neural networks
(ConvNets), can be used for image registration. Thus far training of ConvNets
for registration was supervised using predefined example registrations.
However, obtaining example registrations is not trivial. To circumvent the need
for predefined examples, and thereby to increase convenience of training
ConvNets for image registration, we propose the Deep Learning Image
Registration (DLIR) framework for \textit{unsupervised} affine and deformable
image registration. In the DLIR framework ConvNets are trained for image
registration by exploiting image similarity analogous to conventional
intensity-based image registration. After a ConvNet has been trained with the
DLIR framework, it can be used to register pairs of unseen images in one shot.
We propose flexible ConvNets designs for affine image registration and for
deformable image registration. By stacking multiple of these ConvNets into a
larger architecture, we are able to perform coarse-to-fine image registration.
We show for registration of cardiac cine MRI and registration of chest CT that
performance of the DLIR framework is comparable to conventional image
registration while being several orders of magnitude faster.Comment: Accepted: Medical Image Analysis - Elsevie
Automatic Segmentation of the Left Ventricle in Cardiac CT Angiography Using Convolutional Neural Network
Accurate delineation of the left ventricle (LV) is an important step in
evaluation of cardiac function. In this paper, we present an automatic method
for segmentation of the LV in cardiac CT angiography (CCTA) scans. Segmentation
is performed in two stages. First, a bounding box around the LV is detected
using a combination of three convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
Subsequently, to obtain the segmentation of the LV, voxel classification is
performed within the defined bounding box using a CNN. The study included CCTA
scans of sixty patients, fifty scans were used to train the CNNs for the LV
localization, five scans were used to train LV segmentation and the remaining
five scans were used for testing the method. Automatic segmentation resulted in
the average Dice coefficient of 0.85 and mean absolute surface distance of 1.1
mm. The results demonstrate that automatic segmentation of the LV in CCTA scans
using voxel classification with convolutional neural networks is feasible.Comment: This work has been published as: Zreik, M., Leiner, T., de Vos, B.
D., van Hamersvelt, R. W., Viergever, M. A., I\v{s}gum, I. (2016, April).
Automatic segmentation of the left ventricle in cardiac CT angiography using
convolutional neural networks. In Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2016 IEEE 13th
International Symposium on (pp. 40-43). IEE
Automatic calcium scoring in low-dose chest CT using deep neural networks with dilated convolutions
Heavy smokers undergoing screening with low-dose chest CT are affected by
cardiovascular disease as much as by lung cancer. Low-dose chest CT scans
acquired in screening enable quantification of atherosclerotic calcifications
and thus enable identification of subjects at increased cardiovascular risk.
This paper presents a method for automatic detection of coronary artery,
thoracic aorta and cardiac valve calcifications in low-dose chest CT using two
consecutive convolutional neural networks. The first network identifies and
labels potential calcifications according to their anatomical location and the
second network identifies true calcifications among the detected candidates.
This method was trained and evaluated on a set of 1744 CT scans from the
National Lung Screening Trial. To determine whether any reconstruction or only
images reconstructed with soft tissue filters can be used for calcification
detection, we evaluated the method on soft and medium/sharp filter
reconstructions separately. On soft filter reconstructions, the method achieved
F1 scores of 0.89, 0.89, 0.67, and 0.55 for coronary artery, thoracic aorta,
aortic valve and mitral valve calcifications, respectively. On sharp filter
reconstructions, the F1 scores were 0.84, 0.81, 0.64, and 0.66, respectively.
Linearly weighted kappa coefficients for risk category assignment based on per
subject coronary artery calcium were 0.91 and 0.90 for soft and sharp filter
reconstructions, respectively. These results demonstrate that the presented
method enables reliable automatic cardiovascular risk assessment in all
low-dose chest CT scans acquired for lung cancer screening
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