1,593 research outputs found
Learning-based Ensemble Average Propagator Estimation
By capturing the anisotropic water diffusion in tissue, diffusion magnetic
resonance imaging (dMRI) provides a unique tool for noninvasively probing the
tissue microstructure and orientation in the human brain. The diffusion profile
can be described by the ensemble average propagator (EAP), which is inferred
from observed diffusion signals. However, accurate EAP estimation using the
number of diffusion gradients that is clinically practical can be challenging.
In this work, we propose a deep learning algorithm for EAP estimation, which is
named learning-based ensemble average propagator estimation (LEAPE). The EAP is
commonly represented by a basis and its associated coefficients, and here we
choose the SHORE basis and design a deep network to estimate the coefficients.
The network comprises two cascaded components. The first component is a
multiple layer perceptron (MLP) that simultaneously predicts the unknown
coefficients. However, typical training loss functions, such as mean squared
errors, may not properly represent the geometry of the possibly non-Euclidean
space of the coefficients, which in particular causes problems for the
extraction of directional information from the EAP. Therefore, to regularize
the training, in the second component we compute an auxiliary output of
approximated fiber orientation (FO) errors with the aid of a second MLP that is
trained separately. We performed experiments using dMRI data that resemble
clinically achievable -space sampling, and observed promising results
compared with the conventional EAP estimation method.Comment: Accepted by MICCAI 201
Revealing Hidden Potentials of the q-Space Signal in Breast Cancer
Mammography screening for early detection of breast lesions currently suffers
from high amounts of false positive findings, which result in unnecessary
invasive biopsies. Diffusion-weighted MR images (DWI) can help to reduce many
of these false-positive findings prior to biopsy. Current approaches estimate
tissue properties by means of quantitative parameters taken from generative,
biophysical models fit to the q-space encoded signal under certain assumptions
regarding noise and spatial homogeneity. This process is prone to fitting
instability and partial information loss due to model simplicity. We reveal
unexplored potentials of the signal by integrating all data processing
components into a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that is
designed to propagate clinical target information down to the raw input images.
This approach enables simultaneous and target-specific optimization of image
normalization, signal exploitation, global representation learning and
classification. Using a multicentric data set of 222 patients, we demonstrate
that our approach significantly improves clinical decision making with respect
to the current state of the art.Comment: Accepted conference paper at MICCAI 201
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