Building of atlases plays a crucial role in the analysis of brain images. In scenarios where early growth, aging or disease trajectories are of key importance, longitudinal atlases become necessary as references, most often created from cross-sectional data. New opportunities will be offered by creating longitudinal brain atlases from longitudinal subject-specific image data, where explicit modeling of subject's variability in slope and intercept leads to a more robust estimation of average trajectories but also to estimates of confidence bounds. This work focuses on a framework to build a continuous 4D atlas from longitudinal high angular resolution diffusion images (HARDI) where, unlike atlases of derived scalar diffusion indices such as FA, statistics on dODFs is preserved. Multi-scalar images obtained from DW images are used for geometric alignment, and linear mixed-effects modeling from longitudinal diffusion orientation distribution functions (dODF) leads to estimation of continuous dODF changes. The proposed method is applied to a longitudinal dataset of HARDI images from healthy developing infants in the age range of 3 to 36 months. Verification of mixed-effects modeling is obtained by voxel-wise goodness of fit calculations. To demonstrate the potential of our method, we display changes of longitudinal atlas using dODF and derived generalized fractional anisotropy (GFA) of dODF. We also investigate white matter maturation patterns in genu, body, and splenium of the corpus callosum. The framework can be used to build an average dODF atlas from HARDI data and to derive subject-specific and population-based longitudinal change trajectories.
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；University of Cape Town Faculty of Health Sciences（开普敦大学健康科学学院）；Wayne State University School of Medicine（韦恩州立大学医学院）；MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）
Skullstripping is defined as the task of segmenting brain tissue from a full head magnetic resonance image~(MRI). It is a critical component in neuroimage processing pipelines. Downstream deformable registration and whole brain segmentation performance is highly dependent on accurate skullstripping. Skullstripping is an especially challenging task for infant~(age range 0--18 months) head MRI images due to the significant size and shape variability of the head and the brain in that age range. Infant brain tissue development also changes the $T_1$-weighted image contrast over time, making consis…
Rewiring Development in Brain Segmentation: Leveraging Adult Brain Priors for Enhancing Infant MRI Segmentation
Department of Information Engineering University of Brescia (Italy)（信息工程系，布雷西亚大学）；School of Psychology & Neuroscience University of Glasgow (UK)（心理学与神经科学学院，格拉斯哥大学）；Department of Medical and Surgical Specialties, Radiological Sciences, and Public Health University of Brescia (Italy)（医学与外科专科、放射科学与公共卫生系，布雷西亚大学）
University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心）；Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital（勒邦赫尔儿童医院）；University of Memphis（孟菲斯大学）
Human brain development is rapid during infancy and early childhood. Many disease processes impair this development. Therefore, brain developmental age estimation (BDAE) is essential for all diseases affecting cognitive development. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of infants shows brain growth and morphologic patterns during childhood. Therefore, we can estimate the developmental age from brain images. However, MRI analysis is time-consuming because each scan contains millions of data points (voxels). We investigated the three-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D CNN), a deep le…
University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心）；Children's Foundation Research Institute at LeBonheur Children's Hospital（勒邦赫儿童医院儿童基金会研究所）；LeBonheur Children's Hospital（勒邦赫儿童医院）；University of Tennessee School of Medicine（田纳西大学医学院）
The ability to determine if the brain is developing normally is a key component of pediatric neuroradiology and neurology. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of infants demonstrates a specific pattern of development beyond simply myelination. While radiologists have used myelination patterns, brain morphology and size characteristics in determining if brain maturity matches the chronological age of the patient, this requires years of experience with pediatric neuroradiology. Due to the lack of standardized criteria, estimation of brain maturity before age three remains fraught with interob…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Columbia University Irving Medical Center（哥伦比亚大学欧文医学中心）
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) noninvasively provides critical information about how human brain structures develop across stages of life. Developmental scientists are particularly interested in the first few years of neurodevelopment. Despite the success of MRI collection and analysis for adults, it is a challenge for researchers to collect high-quality multimodal MRIs from developing infants mainly because of their irregular sleep pattern, limited attention, inability to follow instructions to stay still, and a lack of analysis approaches. These challenges often lead to a significant reduc…
The development of automated tools for brain morphometric analysis in infants has lagged significantly behind analogous tools for adults. This gap reflects the greater challenges in this domain due to: 1) a smaller-scaled region of interest, 2) increased motion corruption, 3) regional changes in geometry due to heterochronous growth, and 4) regional variations in contrast properties corresponding to ongoing myelination and other maturation processes. Nevertheless, there is a great need for automated image-processing tools to quantify differences between infant groups and other individuals, bec…
The need for affordable and appropriate medical technologies for developing countries continue to rise as challenges such as inadequate energy supply, limited technical expertise and poor infrastructure persists. Low-field MRI is a technology that can be tailored to meet specific imaging needs within such countries. Its low power requirements and the possibility of operating in minimally shielded or unshielded environments make it especially attractive. Although the technology has been widely demonstrated over several decades, it is yet to be shown that it can be diagnostic and improve patient…
University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市自然科学大学）；John von Neumann Institute, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市约翰·冯·诺依曼研究所）；Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City（胡志明市越南国家大学）；University of Arkansas, Fayetteville（阿肯色大学费耶特维尔分校）
While Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has played an essential role in infant brain analysis, segmenting MRI into a number of tissues such as gray matter (GM), white matter (WM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is crucial and complex due to the extremely low intensity contrast between tissues at around 6-9 months of age as well as amplified noise, myelination, and incomplete volume. In this paper, we tackle those limitations by developing a new deep learning model, named DAM-AL, which contains two main contributions, i.e., dilated attention mechanism and hard-case attention loss. Our DAM-AL netw…
Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学）；Radboud University Medical Center（拉德堡德大学医学中心）；Shandong University (Weihai)（山东大学（威海））
Missing scans are inevitable in longitudinal studies due to either subject dropouts or failed scans. In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework to predict missing scans from acquired scans, catering to longitudinal infant studies. Prediction of infant brain MRI is challenging owing to the rapid contrast and structural changes particularly during the first year of life. We introduce a trustworthy metamorphic generative adversarial network (MGAN) for translating infant brain MRI from one time-point to another. MGAN has three key features: (i) Image translation leveraging spatial and fre…
Myelination plays an important role in the neurological development of infant brain and MRI can visualize the myelination extension as T1 high and T2 low signal intensity at white matter. We tried to construct a convolutional neural network machine learning model to estimate the myelination. Eight layers CNN architecture was constructed to estimate the subjects age with T1 and T2 weighted image at 5 levels associated with myelin maturation in 119 subjects up to 24 months. CNN model learned with all age dataset revealed a strong correlation between the estimated age and the corrected age and th…
Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心生物医学工程系）；Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS（弗劳恩霍夫数字医学MEVIS研究所）；Enanta Pharmaceuticals（Enanta制药公司）
Determining if the brain is developing normally is a key component of pediatric neuroradiology and neurology. Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of infants demonstrates a specific pattern of development beyond simply myelination. While radiologists have used myelination patterns, brain morphology and size characteristics to determine age-adequate brain maturity, this requires years of experience in pediatric neuroradiology. With no standardized criteria, visual estimation of the structural maturity of the brain from MRI before three years of age remains dominated by inter-observer and intr…
Image Sciences Institute, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心图像科学研究所）；Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心威廉明娜儿童医院）；Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心鲁道夫·马格努斯脑中心）
Automatic neonatal brain tissue segmentation in preterm born infants is a prerequisite for evaluation of brain development. However, automatic segmentation is often hampered by motion artifacts caused by infant head movements during image acquisition. Methods have been developed to remove or minimize these artifacts during image reconstruction using frequency domain data. However, frequency domain data might not always be available. Hence, in this study we propose a method for removing motion artifacts from the already reconstructed MR scans. The method employs a generative adversarial network…
This paper presents a deep learning framework for image classification aimed at increasing predictive performance for Cytotoxic Edema (CE) diagnosis in infants and children. The proposed framework includes two 3D network architectures optimized to learn from two types of clinical MRI data , a trace Diffusion Weighted Image (DWI) and the calculated Apparent Diffusion Coefficient map (ADC). This work proposes a robust and novel solution based on volumetric analysis of 3D images (using pixels from time slices) and 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) models. While simple in architecture, the pro…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Korea University（高丽大学）
Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a unique imaging technique for in vivo characterization of tissue microstructure and white matter pathways. However, its relatively long acquisition time implies greater motion artifacts when imaging, for example, infants and Parkinson's disease patients. To accelerate dMRI acquisition, we propose in this paper (i) a diffusion encoding scheme, called Slice-Interleaved Diffusion Encoding (SIDE), that interleaves each diffusion-weighted (DW) image volume with slices that are encoded with different diffusion gradients, essentially allowing the slice-undersampling of image …
Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin（电气与计算机工程系Chandra家族部门德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Department of Imaging Physics MD Anderson Cancer Center（成像物理系MD安德森癌症中心）；Department of Diagnostic Medicine The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School（诊断医学系德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校Dell医学院）；Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences The University of Texas at Austin（计算工程与科学学院Oden研究所德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Annotation-free deep learning for detection and segmentation of fetal germinal matrix-intraventricular hemorrhage in brain MRI
Department of Radiology, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西第二医院放射科）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua Medicine, Tsinghua University（清华大学医学院生物医学工程系）；Department of Radiology, Sichuan Provincial Woman’s and Children’s Hospital, The Affiliated Women’s and Children’s Hospital of Chengdu Medical College（四川省妇幼保健院放射科，成都医学院附属妇幼医院）；Chengdu Women’s and Children’s Central Hospital, School of Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（成都妇女儿童中央医院，电子科技大学医学院）；Department of Radiology, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University（郑州大学第三附属医院放射科）；Qujing Maternal and Child Health Hospital, Qujing, China（曲靖 maternal and child health hospital, Qujing, China）
