An end-to-end image analysis pipeline is presented for the abdominal MRI protocol used in the UK Biobank on the first 38,971 participants. Emphasis is on the processing steps necessary to ensure a high-level of data quality and consistency is produced in order to prepare the datasets for downstream quantitative analysis, such as segmentation and parameter estimation. Quality control procedures have been incorporated to detect and, where possible, correct issues in the raw data. Detection of fat-water swaps in the Dixon series is performed by a deep learning model and corrected automatically. Bone joints are predicted using a hybrid atlas-based registration and deep learning model for the shoulders, hips and knees. Simultaneous estimation of proton density fat fraction and transverse relaxivity (R2*) is performed using both the magnitude and phase information for the single-slice multiecho series. Approximately 98.1% of the two-point Dixon acquisitions were successfully processed and passed quality control, with 99.98% of the high-resolution T1-weighted 3D volumes succeeding. Approximately 99.98% of the single-slice multiecho acquisitions covering the liver were successfully processed and passed quality control, with 97.6% of the single-slice multiecho acquisitions covering the pancreas succeeding. At least one fat-water swap was detected in 1.8% of participants. With respect to the bone joints, approximately 3.3% of participants were missing at least one knee joint and 0.8% were missing at least one shoulder joint. For the participants who received both single-slice multiecho acquisition protocols for the liver a systematic difference between the two protocols was identified and modeled using multiple linear regression. The findings presented here will be invaluable for scientists who seek to use image-derived phenotypes from the abdominal MRI protocol.
Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；Antaros Medical AB（安塔罗斯医疗公司）
The UK Biobank is collecting extensive data on health-related characteristics of over half a million volunteers. The biological samples of blood and urine can provide valuable insight on kidney function, with important links to cardiovascular and metabolic health. Further information on kidney anatomy could be obtained by medical imaging. In contrast to the brain, heart, liver, and pancreas, no dedicated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is planned for the kidneys. An image-based assessment is nonetheless feasible in the neck-to-knee body MRI intended for abdominal body composition analysis, wh…
Radiofrequency field inhomogeneity is a significant issue in imaging large fields of view in high- and ultrahigh-field MRI. Passive shimming with coupled coils or dielectric pads is the most common approach at 3 T. We introduce and test light and compact metasurface, providing the same homogeneity improvement in clinical abdominal imaging at 3 T as a conventional dielectric pad. The metasurface comprising a periodic structure of copper strips and parallel-plate capacitive elements printed on a flexible polyimide substrate supports propagation of slow electromagnetic waves similar to a high-per…
School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院生物医学工程与成像科学学院）；Department of Women and Children’s Health, School of Life Course Sciences, King’s College London（伦敦国王学院生命历程科学学院妇幼健康系）
Accurately estimating and correcting the motion artifacts are crucial for 3D image reconstruction of the abdominal and in-utero magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The state-of-art methods are based on slice-to-volume registration (SVR) where multiple 2D image stacks are acquired in three orthogonal orientations. In this work, we present a novel reconstruction pipeline that only needs one orientation of 2D MRI scans and can reconstruct the full high-resolution image without masking or registration steps. The framework consists of two main stages: the respiratory motion estimation using a self-su…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Cedars-Sinai Medical Center（西达赛奈医疗中心）；Capital Medical University（首都医科大学）；Fujian Medical University Union Hospital（福建医科大学附属协和医院）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Segmentation of multiple organs-at-risk (OARs) is essential for radiation therapy treatment planning and other clinical applications. We developed an Automated deep Learning-based Abdominal Multi-Organ segmentation (ALAMO) framework based on 2D U-net and a densely connected network structure with tailored design in data augmentation and training procedures such as deep connection, auxiliary supervision, and multi-view. The model takes in multi-slice MR images and generates the output of segmentation results. Three-Tesla T1 VIBE (Volumetric Interpolated Breath-hold Examination) images of 102 su…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Abdominal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides a straightforward way of characterizing tissue and locating lesions of patients as in standard diagnosis. However, abdominal MRI often suffers from respiratory motion artifacts, which leads to blurring and ghosting that significantly deteriorate the imaging quality. Conventional methods to reduce or eliminate these motion artifacts include breath holding, patient sedation, respiratory gating, and image post-processing, but these strategies inevitably involve extra scanning time and patient discomfort. In this paper, we propose a novel deep-le…
Otto von Guericke University (OVGU)（奥托·冯·格里克大学（OVGU））
Dynamic MRI is a technique of acquiring a series of images continuously to follow the physiological changes over time. However, such fast imaging results in low resolution images. In this work, abdominal deformation model computed from dynamic low resolution images have been applied to high resolution image, acquired previously, to generate dynamic high resolution MRI. Dynamic low resolution images were simulated into different breathing phases (inhale and exhale). Then, the image registration between breathing time points was performed using the B-spline SyN deformable model and using cross-c…
SINTEF（挪威科学与工业研究基金会）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)（挪威科技大学）；St. Olavs hospital, Trondheim University Hospital（圣奥拉夫医院，特隆赫姆大学医院）；Oslo University Hospital（奥斯陆大学医院）
Purpose: This study aims to explore training strategies to improve convolutional neural network-based image-to-image deformable registration for abdominal imaging. Methods: Different training strategies, loss functions, and transfer learning schemes were considered. Furthermore, an augmentation layer which generates artificial training image pairs on-the-fly was proposed, in addition to a loss layer that enables dynamic loss weighting. Results: Guiding registration using segmentations in the training step proved beneficial for deep-learning-based image registration. Finetuning the pretrained m…
Objective : Abdominal anatomy segmentation is crucial for numerous applications from computer-assisted diagnosis to image-guided surgery. In this context, we address fully-automated multi-organ segmentation from abdominal CT and MR images using deep learning. Methods: The proposed model extends standard conditional generative adversarial networks. Additionally to the discriminator which enforces the model to create realistic organ delineations, it embeds cascaded partially pre-trained convolutional encoder-decoders as generator. Encoder fine-tuning from a large amount of non-medical images all…
Image registration aims to establish spatial correspondence across pairs, or groups of images, and is a cornerstone of medical image computing and computer-assisted-interventions. Currently, most deep learning-based registration methods assume that the desired deformation fields are globally smooth and continuous, which is not always valid for real-world scenarios, especially in medical image registration (e.g. cardiac imaging and abdominal imaging). Such a global constraint can lead to artefacts and increased errors at discontinuous tissue interfaces. To tackle this issue, we propose a weakly…
Robustness Evaluation of a Foundation Segmentation Model Under Simulated Domain Shifts in Abdominal CT: Implications for Health Digital Twin Deployment
Healthcare Informatics, University of Illinois Springfield（医疗信息学，伊利诺伊大学斯普林菲尔德分校）
Department of Surgical Sciences, Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学外科学系）；Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学信息技术系）；Antaros Medical AB
UK Biobank (UKB) conducts large-scale examinations of more than half a million volunteers, collecting health-related information on genetics, lifestyle, blood biochemistry, and more. Medical imaging of 100,000 subjects, with 70,000 follow-up sessions, enables measurements of organs, muscle, and body composition. With up to 170,000 mounting MR images, various methodologies are accordingly engaged in large-scale image analysis. This work presents an experimental inference engine that can automatically predict a comprehensive profile of subject metadata from UKB neck-to-knee body MRI. It was eval…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Sigma Technologies（12西格玛科技公司）；Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）
Segmentation of abdominal computed tomography(CT) provides spatial context, morphological properties, and a framework for tissue-specific radiomics to guide quantitative Radiological assessment. A 2015 MICCAI challenge spurred substantial innovation in multi-organ abdominal CT segmentation with both traditional and deep learning methods. Recent innovations in deep methods have driven performance toward levels for which clinical translation is appealing. However, continued cross-validation on open datasets presents the risk of indirect knowledge contamination and could result in circular reason…
Self-Supervised k-Space Regularization for Motion-Resolved Abdominal MRI Using Neural Implicit k-Space Representation
Helmholtz Center Munich（慕尼黑亥姆霍兹中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Millenium Institute for Intelligent Healthcare Engineering（千禧智能医疗工程研究所）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
The University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
The exploitation of large-scale population data has the potential to improve healthcare by discovering and understanding patterns and trends within this data. To enable high throughput analysis of cardiac imaging data automatically, a pipeline should comprise quality monitoring of the input images, segmentation of the cardiac structures, assessment of the segmentation quality, and parsing of cardiac functional indexes. We present a fully automatic, high throughput image parsing workflow for the analysis of cardiac MR images, and test its performance on the UK Biobank (UKB) cardiac dataset. The…
Sparsity of annotated data is a major limitation in medical image processing tasks such as registration. Registered multimodal image data are essential for the diagnosis of medical conditions and the success of interventional medical procedures. To overcome the shortage of data, we present a method that allows the generation of annotated multimodal 4D datasets. We use a CycleGAN network architecture to generate multimodal synthetic data from the 4D extended cardiac-torso (XCAT) phantom and real patient data. Organ masks are provided by the XCAT phantom, therefore the generated dataset can serv…
Ultrasound image degradation in the human body is complex and occurs due to the distortion of the wave as it propagates to and from the target. Here, we establish a simulation based framework that deconstructs the sources of image degradation into a separable parameter space that includes phase aberration from speed variation, multiple reverberations, and trailing reverberation. These separable parameters are then used to reconstruct images with known and independently modulable amounts of degradation using methods that depend on the additive or multiplicative nature of the degradation. Experi…
National Institute of Mental Health（美国国家精神卫生研究所）；Birkbeck College（伯克贝克学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Deep neural networks have brought remarkable breakthroughs in medical image analysis. However, due to their data-hungry nature, the modest dataset sizes in medical imaging projects might be hindering their full potential. Generating synthetic data provides a promising alternative, allowing to complement training datasets and conducting medical image research at a larger scale. Diffusion models recently have caught the attention of the computer vision community by producing photorealistic synthetic images. In this study, we explore using Latent Diffusion Models to generate synthetic images from…
Uppsala University（乌普萨拉大学）；Antaros Medical AB（安塔罗斯医疗公司）
Large-scale medical studies such as the UK Biobank examine thousands of volunteer participants with medical imaging techniques. Combined with the vast amount of collected metadata, anatomical information from these images has the potential for medical analyses at unprecedented scale. However, their evaluation often requires manual input and long processing times, limiting the amount of reference values for biomarkers and other measurements available for research. Recent approaches with convolutional neural networks for regression can perform these evaluations automatically. On magnetic resonan…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Barts Heart Centre, St Bartholomew’s Hospital（巴茨心脏中心，圣巴塞洛缪医院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
Convolutional neural network (CNN) based segmentation methods provide an efficient and automated way for clinicians to assess the structure and function of the heart in cardiac MR images. While CNNs can generally perform the segmentation tasks with high accuracy when training and test images come from the same domain (e.g. same scanner or site), their performance often degrades dramatically on images from different scanners or clinical sites. We propose a simple yet effective way for improving the network generalization ability by carefully designing data normalization and augmentation strateg…
There has been increased interest in the quantitative characterization of tissues based on T2 in abdominal imaging. Techniques based on spin-echo or turbo spin-echo sequences are time consuming because they require multiple acquisitions for obtaining an adequate number of TE images for accurate T2 mapping. Radial turbo spin echo (RADTSE) based methods have been shown to generate accurate T2 maps from a single acquisition using highly undersampled data. In this work, we present details of the RADTSE technique, summarizing developments related to the design of pulse sequence and reconstruction a…
Institute for Machine Learning, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院机器学习研究所）；Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等技术学院）；Champalimaud Foundation（尚帕利莫基金会）
In clinical practice, regions of interest in medical imaging often need to be identified through a process of precise image segmentation. The quality of this image segmentation step critically affects the subsequent clinical assessment of the patient status. To enable high accuracy, automatic image segmentation, we introduce a novel deep neural network architecture that exploits the inherent spatial coherence of anatomical structures and is well equipped to capture long-range spatial dependencies in the segmented pixel/voxel space. In contrast to the state-of-the-art solutions based on convolu…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Inpainting has recently been proposed as a successful deep learning technique for unsupervised medical image model discovery. The masks used for inpainting are generally independent of the dataset and are not tailored to perform on different given classes of anatomy. In this work, we introduce a method for generating shape-aware masks for inpainting, which aims at learning the statistical shape prior. We hypothesize that although the variation of masks improves the generalizability of inpainting models, the shape of the masks should follow the topology of the organs of interest. Hence, we prop…
University of Basel（巴塞尔大学）；University Hospital Basel（巴塞尔大学医院）；Paul Scherrer Institute（保罗·谢尔研究所）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）
Motion has been a challenge for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging ever since the MR has been invented. Especially in volumetric imaging of thoracic and abdominal organs, motion-awareness is essential for reducing motion artifacts in the final image. A recently proposed MR imaging approach copes with motion by observing the motion patterns during the acquisition. Repetitive scanning of the k-space center region enables the extraction of the patient motion while acquiring the remaining part of the k-space. Due to highly redundant measurements of the center, the required scanning time of over 11 mi…
Translating Electrocardiograms to Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Useful for Cardiac Assessment and Disease Screening: A Multi-Center Study
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Vascular Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院血管外科）；Department of Cardiology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院心内科）；Department of Radiology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院放射科）；Department of Vascular Surgery, Quzhou People’s Hospital（衢州人民医院血管外科）；Department of Cardiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine（浙江大学医学院附属第二医院心内科）；China Ship Scientific Research Center（中国船舶科学研究院）；Guangdong Transtek Medical Electronics Co., Ltd.（广东 Transtek 医疗电子有限公司）
Applications of ultrasound images have expanded from fetal imaging to abdominal and cardiac diagnosis. Liver-being the largest gland in the body and responsible for metabolic activities requires to be to be diagnosed and therefore subject to utmost injury. Although, ultrasound imaging has developed into three and four dimensions providing higher amount of information; it requires highly trained medical staff due to the image complexity and dimensions it contain. Since 2D ultrasound images are still considered to be the basis of clinical treatments,computer aided automated liver diagnosis is ve…
Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院保罗·C·劳特伯生物医学成像研究中心）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Image Analysis and Application（广东省医学图像分析与应用人工智能重点实验室）
Multi-parametric magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is an indispensable tool in the clinic. Consequently, automatic volume-of-interest segmentation based on multi-parametric MR imaging is crucial for computer-aided disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and prognosis monitoring. Despite the extensive studies conducted in deep learning-based medical image analysis, further investigations are still required to effectively exploit the information provided by different imaging parameters. How to fuse the information is a key question in this field. Here, we propose an uncertainty-aware multi-parametr…
Vingroup Big Data Institute（Vingroup大数据研究院）；VinUniversity（VinUniversity大学）
X-ray imaging in DICOM format is the most commonly used imaging modality in clinical practice, resulting in vast, non-normalized databases. This leads to an obstacle in deploying AI solutions for analyzing medical images, which often requires identifying the right body part before feeding the image into a specified AI model. This challenge raises the need for an automated and efficient approach to classifying body parts from X-ray scans. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there is no open tool or framework for this task to date. To fill this lack, we introduce a DICOM Imaging Router …
Biomedical Image Analysis Group, Imperial College London, UK（帝国理工学院伦敦生物医学图像分析组）
Real-world settings often do not allow acquisition of high-resolution volumetric images for accurate morphological assessment and diagnostic. In clinical practice it is frequently common to acquire only sparse data (e.g. individual slices) for initial diagnostic decision making. Thereby, physicians rely on their prior knowledge (or mental maps) of the human anatomy to extrapolate the underlying 3D information. Accurate mental maps require years of anatomy training, which in the first instance relies on normative learning, i.e. excluding pathology. In this paper, we leverage Bayesian Deep Learn…
Purpose/Objectives: To develop and assess a strategy of using deep learning (DL) to generate virtual monochromatic CT (VMCT) images from a single-energy CT (SECT) scan. Materials/Methods: The proposed data-driven VMCT imaging consists of two steps: (i) using a supervised DL model trained with a large number of 100 kV and 140 kV dual-energy CT (DECT) image pairs to produce the corresponding high-energy CT image from a low-energy image; and (ii) reconstructing VMCT images with energy ranging from 40 to 150 keV. To evaluate the performance of the method, we retrospectively studied 6,767 abdominal…
Purpose: To develop an algorithm for the retrospective correction of signal dropout artifacts in abdominal diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) resulting from cardiac motion. Methods: Given a set of image repetitions for a slice, a locally adaptive weighted averaging is proposed which aims to suppress the contribution of image regions affected by signal dropouts. Corresponding weight maps were estimated by a sliding-window algorithm which analyzed signal deviations from a patch-wise reference. In order to ensure the computation of a robust reference, repetitions were filtered by a classifier that …
Purpose: Correcting or reducing the effects of voxel intensity non-uniformity (INU) within a given tissue type is a crucial issue for quantitative MRI image analysis in daily clinical practice. In this study, we present a deep learning-based approach for MRI image INU correction. Method: We developed a residual cycle generative adversarial network (res-cycle GAN), which integrates the residual block concept into a cycle-consistent GAN (cycle-GAN). In cycle-GAN, an inverse transformation was implemented between the INU uncorrected and corrected MRI images to constrain the model through forcing …
