Deep learning (DL) is the state-of-the-art methodology in various medical image segmentation tasks. However, it requires relatively large amounts of manually labeled training data, which may be infeasible to generate in some applications. In addition, DL methods have relatively poor generalizability to out-of-sample data. Multi-atlas segmentation (MAS), on the other hand, has promising performance using limited amounts of training data and good generalizability. A hybrid method that integrates the high accuracy of DL and good generalizability of MAS is highly desired and could play an important role in segmentation problems where manually labeled data is hard to generate. Most of the prior work focuses on improving single components of MAS using DL rather than directly optimizing the final segmentation accuracy via an end-to-end pipeline. Only one study explored this idea in binary segmentation of 2D images, but it remains unknown whether it generalizes well to multi-class 3D segmentation problems. In this study, we propose a 3D end-to-end hybrid pipeline, named deep label fusion (DLF), that takes advantage of the strengths of MAS and DL. Experimental results demonstrate that DLF yields significant improvements over conventional label fusion methods and U-Net, a direct DL approach, in the context of segmenting medial temporal lobe subregions using 3T T1-weighted and T2-weighted MRI. Further, when applied to an unseen similar dataset acquired in 7T, DLF maintains its superior performance, which demonstrates its good generalizability.
Deep learning (DL) approaches are state-of-the-art for many medical image segmentation tasks. They offer a number of advantages: they can be trained for specific tasks, computations are fast at test time, and segmentation quality is typically high. In contrast, previously popular multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) methods are relatively slow (as they rely on costly registrations) and even though sophisticated label fusion strategies have been proposed, DL approaches generally outperform MAS. In this work, we propose a DL-based label fusion strategy (VoteNet) which locally selects a set of reliable…
RIKEN Center for Brain Science（理化学研究所脑科学中心）；Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院基础技术研究所）；Univ Montpellier（蒙彼利埃大学）；IMT Mines Alès（法国国立高等矿业电信学校阿莱斯分校）
We present the first automated pipeline to create an atlas of in situ hybridization gene expression in the adult marmoset brain in the same stereotaxic space. The pipeline consists of segmentation of gene expression from microscopy images and registration of images to a standard space. Automation of this pipeline is necessary to analyze the large volume of data in the genome-wide whole-brain dataset, and to process images that have varying intensity profiles and expression patterns with minimal human bias. To reduce the number of labelled images required for training, we develop a semi-supervi…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Centre for Medical Image Computing（医学图像计算中心）
Accurate segmentation of the right ventricle (RV) is a crucial step in the assessment of the ventricular structure and function. Yet, due to its complex anatomy and motion segmentation of the RV has not been as largely studied as the left ventricle. This paper presents a fully automatic method for the segmentation of the RV in cardiac magnetic resonance images (MRI). The method uses a coarse-to-fine segmentation strategy in combination with a multi-atlas propagation segmentation framework. Based on a cross correlation metric, our method selects the best atlases for propagation allowing the ref…
Multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) is a promising framework for medical image segmentation. Generally, MAS methods register multiple atlases, i.e., medical images with corresponding labels, to a target image; and the transformed atlas labels can be combined to generate target segmentation via label fusion schemes. Many conventional MAS methods employed the atlases from the same modality as the target image. However, the number of atlases with the same modality may be limited or even missing in many clinical applications. Besides, conventional MAS methods suffer from the computational burden of reg…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）；University of Lübeck（吕贝克大学）
The construction of three-dimensional multi-modal tissue maps provides an opportunity to spur interdisciplinary innovations across temporal and spatial scales through information integration. While the preponderance of effort is allocated to the cellular level and explore the changes in cell interactions and organizations, contextualizing findings within organs and systems is essential to visualize and interpret higher resolution linkage across scales. There is a substantial normal variation of kidney morphometry and appearance across body size, sex, and imaging protocols in abdominal computed…
AtlasSeg: Atlas Prior Guided Dual-U-Net for Cortical Segmentation in Fetal Brain MRI
College of Biomedical Engineering & Instrument Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学生物医学工程与仪器科学学院）；Beijing Hospital, National Center of Gerontology, Institute of Geriatric Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences（中国医学科学院北京医院国家老年医学中心老年医学研究所）；Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University（山东第一医科大学附属山东省立医院）；State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University（浙江大学CAD&CG国家重点实验室）
Multi-Atlas Brain Network Classification through Consistency Distillation and Complementary Information Fusion
College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（计算与数据科学学院，南洋理工大学）；Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health at National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学 Saw Swee Hock 公共卫生学院）；Cognitive Neuroimaging Centre and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University（认知神经影像中心和 Lee Kong Chian 医学院，南洋理工大学）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）
Segmentation of structural and diffusion MRI (sMRI/dMRI) is usually performed independently in neuroimaging pipelines. However, some brain structures (e.g., globus pallidus, thalamus and its nuclei) can be extracted more accurately by fusing the two modalities. Following the framework of Bayesian segmentation with probabilistic atlases and unsupervised appearance modeling, we present here a novel algorithm to jointly segment multi-modal sMRI/dMRI data. We propose a hierarchical likelihood term for the dMRI defined on the unit ball, which combines the Beta and Dimroth-Scheidegger-Watson distrib…
Multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) is a popular image segmentation technique for medical images. In this work, we improve the performance of MAS by correcting registration errors before label fusion. Specifically, we use a volumetric displacement field to refine registrations based on image anatomical appearance and predicted labels. We show the influence of the initial spatial alignment as well as the beneficial effect of using label information for MAS performance. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed refinement approach improves MAS performance on a 3D magnetic resonance dataset of the kne…
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）；U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs（美国退伍军人事务部）；University of Lübeck（吕贝克大学）
A major goal of lung cancer screening is to identify individuals with particular phenotypes that are associated with high risk of cancer. Identifying relevant phenotypes is complicated by the variation in body position and body composition. In the brain, standardized coordinate systems (e.g., atlases) have enabled separate consideration of local features from gross/global structure. To date, no analogous standard atlas has been presented to enable spatial mapping and harmonization in chest computational tomography (CT). In this paper, we propose a thoracic atlas built upon a large low dose CT …
This paper presents a fully automated method to segment the complex left atrial (LA) cavity, from 3D Gadolinium-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (GE-MRI) scans. The proposed method consists of four steps: (1) preprocessing to convert the original GE-MRI to a probability map, (2) atlas selection to match the atlases to the target image, (3) multi-atlas registration and fusion, and (4) level-set refinement. The method was evaluated on the datasets provided by the MICCAI 2018 STACOM Challenge with 100 dataset for training. Compared to manual annotation, the proposed method achieved an average …
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Erasmus MC - University Medical Center Rotterdam（伊拉斯谟医学中心——鹿特丹大学医学中心）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Registration is a core component of many imaging pipelines. In case of clinical scans, with lower resolution and sometimes substantial motion artifacts, registration can produce poor results. Visual assessment of registration quality in large clinical datasets is inefficient. In this work, we propose to automatically assess the quality of registration to an atlas in clinical FLAIR MRI scans of the brain. The method consists of automatically segmenting the ventricles of a given scan using a neural network, and comparing the segmentation to the atlas' ventricles propagated to image space. We use…
Multi-Atlas Segmentation and Spatial Alignment of the Human Embryo in First Trimester 3D Ultrasound
Erasmus MC, University Medical Center Rotterdam（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心鹿特丹大学医学中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Erasmus MC, University Medical Center（伊拉斯姆斯医学中心大学医学中心）
White Matter Hyperintensities (WMH) are the most common manifestation of cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) on the brain MRI. Accurate WMH segmentation algorithms are important to determine cSVD burden and its clinical consequences. Most of existing WMH segmentation algorithms require both fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) images and T1-weighted images as inputs. However, T1-weighted images are typically not part of standard clinicalscans which are acquired for patients with acute stroke. In this paper, we propose a novel brain atlas guided attention U-Net (BAGAU-Net) that leverage…
In this work, we attempt the segmentation of cardiac structures in late gadolinium-enhanced (LGE) magnetic resonance images (MRI) using only minimal supervision in a two-step approach. In the first step, we register a small set of five LGE cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images with ground truth labels to a set of 40 target LGE CMR images without annotation. Each manually annotated ground truth provides labels of the myocardium and the left ventricle (LV) and right ventricle (RV) cavities, which are used as atlases. After multi-atlas label fusion by majority voting, we possess noisy labels fo…
Resting state fMRI (rsfMRI) has been shown to be a promising tool to study intrinsic functional connectivity and assess its integrity in cerebral development. In neonates, where fMRI is limited to few paradigms, rsfMRI was shown to be a relevant tool to explore regional interactions of brain networks. However, to identify the resting state networks, data needs to be carefully processed. Because of the non-collaborative nature of the neonates, the differences in brain size and the reversed contrast compared to adults, neonates can't be processed with the existing adult pipelines. Therefore, we …
Automatic and reliable quantitative tools for MR brain image analysis are a very valuable resources for both clinical and research environments. In the last years, this field has experienced many advances with successful techniques based on label fusion and more recently deep learning. However, few of them have been specifically designed to provide a dense anatomical labelling at multiscale level and to deal with brain anatomical alterations such as white matter lesions. In this work, we present a fully automatic pipeline (vol2Brain) for whole brain segmentation and analysis which densely labe…
