Image registration of liver dynamic contrast-enhanced computed tomography (DCE-CT) is crucial for diagnosis and image-guided surgical planning of liver cancer. However, intensity variations due to the flow of contrast agents combined with complex spatial motion induced by respiration brings great challenge to existing intensity-based registration methods. To address these problems, we propose a novel structure-aware registration method by incorporating structural information of related organs with segmentation-guided deep registration network. Existing segmentation-guided registration methods only focus on volumetric registration inside the paired organ segmentations, ignoring the inherent attributes of their anatomical structures. In addition, such paired organ segmentations are not always available in DCE-CT images due to the flow of contrast agents. Different from existing segmentation-guided registration methods, our proposed method extracts structural information in hierarchical geometric perspectives of line and surface. Then, according to the extracted structural information, structure-aware constraints are constructed and imposed on the forward and backward deformation field simultaneously. In this way, all available organ segmentations, including unpaired ones, can be fully utilized to avoid the side effect of contrast agent and preserve the topology of organs during registration. Extensive experiments on an in-house liver DCE-CT dataset and a public LiTS dataset show that our proposed method can achieve higher registration accuracy and preserve anatomical structure more effectively than state-of-the-art methods.
Institute for Medical Imaging Technology, School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China（中国上海200030，上海交通大学生物医学工程学院医学影像技术研究所）；Department of Radiology and Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA（美国北卡罗来纳州教堂山27599，北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校放射学与生物医学研究成像中心（BRIC））；North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China（中国北京华北电力大学）；Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd, Shanghai, China（中国上海上海联影智能科技有限公司）；Shanghai Cancer Center, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（中国上海复旦大学附属肿瘤医院）
Thermal ablation is a minimally invasive procedure for treat-ing small or unresectable tumors. Although CT is widely used for guiding ablation procedures, the contrast of tumors against surrounding normal tissues in CT images is often poor, aggravating the difficulty in accurate thermal ablation. In this paper, we propose a fast MR-CT image registration method to overlay a pre-procedural MR (pMR) image onto an intra-procedural CT (iCT) image for guiding the thermal ablation of liver tumors. By first using a Cycle-GAN model with mutual information constraint to generate synthesized CT (sCT) ima…
Multi-modality image registration is one of the most underlined processes in medical image analysis. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown significant potential in deformable registration. However, the lack of voxel-wise ground truth challenges the training of CNNs for an accurate registration. In this work, we propose a cross-modality similarity metric, based on the KL-divergence of image variables, and implement an efficient estimation method using a CNN. This estimation network, referred to as KLDivNet, can be trained unsupervisedly. We then embed the KLDivNet into a reg…
Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht（乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学中心）
Most MRI liver segmentation methods use a structural 3D scan as input, such as a T1 or T2 weighted scan. Segmentation performance may be improved by utilizing both structural and functional information, as contained in dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MR series. Dynamic information can be incorporated in a segmentation method based on convolutional neural networks in a number of ways. In this study, the optimal input configuration of DCE MR images for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is studied. The performance of three different input configurations for CNNs is studied for a liver segmenta…
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Deep learning based methods provide efficient solutions to medical image registration, including the challenging problem of diffeomorphic image registration. However, most methods register normal image pairs, facing difficulty handling those with missing correspondences, e.g., in the presence of pathology like tumors. We desire an efficient solution to jointly account for spatial deformations and appearance changes in the pathological regions where the correspondences are missing, i.e., finding a solution to metamorphic image registration. Some approaches are proposed to tackle this problem, b…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital（布莱根妇女医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Deformable image registration (DIR) is essential for many image-guided therapies. Recently, deep learning approaches have gained substantial popularity and success in DIR. Most deep learning approaches use the so-called mono-stream "high-to-low, low-to-high" network structure, and can achieve satisfactory overall registration results. However, accurate alignments for some severely deformed local regions, which are crucial for pinpointing surgical targets, are often overlooked. Consequently, these approaches are not sensitive to some hard-to-align regions, e.g., intra-patient registration of de…
Center for Image Sciences, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands（荷兰乌得勒支大学医学中心影像科学中心）；Department of Radiology, University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands（荷兰乌得勒支大学医学中心放射科）
Motion correction of dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance images (DCE-MRI) is a challenging task, due to changes in image appearance. In this study a groupwise registration, using a principle component analysis (PCA) based metric,1 is evaluated for clinical DCE MRI of the liver. The groupwise registration transforms the images to a common space, rather than to a reference volume as conventional pairwise methods do, and computes the similarity metric on all volumes simultaneously. This groupwise registration method is compared to a pairwise approach using a mutual information metric. Cl…
Deformable registration of two-dimensional/three-dimensional (2D/3D) images of abdominal organs is a complicated task because the abdominal organs deform significantly and their contours are not detected in two-dimensional X-ray images. We propose a supervised deep learning framework that achieves 2D/3D deformable image registration between 3D volumes and single-viewpoint 2D projected images. The proposed method learns the translation from the target 2D projection images and the initial 3D volume to 3D displacement fields. In experiments, we registered 3D-computed tomography (CT) volumes to di…
Hunan University of Technology and Business（湖南工商大学）；Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；University of Idaho（爱达荷大学）
Liver segmentation from abdominal CT images is an essential step for liver cancer computer-aided diagnosis and surgical planning. However, both the accuracy and robustness of existing liver segmentation methods cannot meet the requirements of clinical applications. In particular, for the common clinical cases where the liver tissue contains major pathology, current segmentation methods show poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel low-rank tensor decomposition (LRTD) based multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) framework that achieves accurate and robust pathological liver segmentation of C…
Search-MIND: Training-Free Multi-Modal Medical Image Registration
Lab for Uncertainty in Data and Decision Making (LUCID), Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, UK（英国诺丁汉大学医学院诺丁汉生物医学研究中心（BRC）数据与决策不确定性实验室（LUCID））
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；University of Ulsan College of Medicine（蔚山大学医学院）；Asan Medical Center（峨山医学中心）
Medical image registration is one of the key processing steps for biomedical image analysis such as cancer diagnosis. Recently, deep learning based supervised and unsupervised image registration methods have been extensively studied due to its excellent performance in spite of ultra-fast computational time compared to the classical approaches. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised medical image registration method that trains deep neural network for deformable registration of 3D volumes using a cycle-consistency. Thanks to the cycle consistency, the proposed deep neural networks can t…
To deform or not: treatment-aware longitudinal registration for breast DCE-MRI during neoadjuvant chemotherapy via unsupervised keypoints detection
Radboud University Medical Centre（拉德堡德大学医学中心）；The Netherlands Cancer Institute（荷兰癌症研究所）；Macao Polytechnic University（澳门理工大学）；Maastricht University Medical Centre（马斯特里赫特大学医学中心）
An objective comparison of methods for augmented reality in laparoscopic liver resection by preoperative-to-intraoperative image fusion
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Clermont-Ferrand（克莱蒙费朗大学医院中心）；National University of Singapore (NUS)（新加坡国立大学）；National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT/UCC Dresden)（德国国家肿瘤疾病中心（德累斯顿））；Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
The non-rigid registration between CT data and ultrasonic images of liver can facilitate the diagnosis and treatment, which has been widely studied in recent years. To improve the registration accuracy of the Demons model on the non-rigid registration between 3D CT liver data and 2D ultrasonic images, a novel boundary extraction and enhancement method based on radial directional local intuitionistic fuzzy entropy in the polar coordinates has been put forward, and a new registration workflow has been provided. Experiments show that our method can acquire high-accuracy registration results. Expe…
Primary tumors have a high likelihood of developing metastases in the liver and early detection of these metastases is crucial for patient outcome. We propose a method based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) to detect liver metastases. First, the liver was automatically segmented using the six phases of abdominal dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MR images. Next, DCE-MR and diffusion weighted (DW) MR images are used for metastases detection within the liver mask. The liver segmentations have a median Dice similarity coefficient of 0.95 compared with manual annotations. The metastases detect…
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…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁大学医学院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学苏州高等研究院）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Multimodal image registration has many applications in diagnostic medical imaging and image-guided interventions, such as Transcatheter Arterial Chemoembolization (TACE) of liver cancer guided by intraprocedural CBCT and pre-operative MR. The ability to register peri-procedurally acquired diagnostic images into the intraprocedural environment can potentially improve the intra-procedural tumor targeting, which will significantly improve therapeutic outcomes. However, the intra-procedural CBCT often suffers from suboptimal image quality due to lack of signal calibration for Hounsfield unit, limi…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Guilin University of Electronic Technology（桂林电子科技大学）；Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia（费城儿童医院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Conventional deformable registration methods aim at solving an optimization model carefully designed on image pairs and their computational costs are exceptionally high. In contrast, recent deep learning based approaches can provide fast deformation estimation. These heuristic network architectures are fully data-driven and thus lack explicit geometric constraints, e.g., topology-preserving, which are indispensable to generate plausible deformations. We design a new deep learning based framework to optimize a diffeomorphic model via multi-scale propagation in order to integrate advantages and …
École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔高等理工学院）；École de technologie supérieure（高等工程技术学院）
In this paper, an automatic method is proposed to perform image registration in visible and infrared pair of video sequences for multiple targets. In multimodal image analysis like image fusion systems, color and IR sensors are placed close to each other and capture a same scene simultaneously, but the videos are not properly aligned by default because of different fields of view, image capturing information, working principle and other camera specifications. Because the scenes are usually not planar, alignment needs to be performed continuously by extracting relevant common information. In th…
DINOMotion: advanced robust tissue motion tracking with DINOv2 in 2D-Cine MRI-guided radiotherapy
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University（计算机科学与软件工程系，康科迪亚大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University（电气与计算机工程系，康科迪亚大学）；Elekta Ltd.（Elekta公司）；Diagnos Medical Systems（Diagnos医疗系统）
Philips Research Paris（飞利浦巴黎研究院）；Hospices Civils de Lyon（里昂民用医院）
We address the problem of multimodal liver segmentation in paired but unregistered T1 and T2-weighted MR images. We compare several strategies described in the literature, with or without multi-task training, with or without pre-registration. We also compare different loss functions (cross-entropy, Dice loss, and three adversarial losses). All methods achieved comparable performances with the exception of a multi-task setting that performs both segmentations at once, which performed poorly.
Deep Regression 2D-3D Ultrasound Registration for Liver Motion Correction in Focal Tumor Thermal Ablation
Robarts Research Institute（罗伯茨研究所）；Western University（西安大略大学）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Western University（西安大略大学生物医学工程学院）；Lawson Health Research Institute（劳森健康研究所）
A Novel Framework for Integrating 3D Ultrasound into Percutaneous Liver Tumour Ablation
Robarts Research Institute, Western University, London, Canada（罗巴茨研究所在西蒙大学伦敦分校）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Western University, London, Canada（生物医学工程学院，西蒙大学伦敦分校）；Department of Medical Biophysics, Western University, London, Canada（医学生物物理学系，西蒙大学伦敦分校）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Western University, London, Canada（电气与计算机工程系，西蒙大学伦敦分校）；Department of Medical Imaging, Western University, London, Canada（医学影像系，西蒙大学伦敦分校）
Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Couinaud Segmentation for Precision Liver Cancer Therapy
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Wake Forest University（维克森林大学）；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）；Shandong First Medical University（山东第一医科大学）
Dynamic Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a tissue perfusion imaging technique. Some versatile free-breathing DCE-MRI techniques combining compressed sensing (CS) and parallel imaging with golden-angle radial sampling have been developed to improve motion robustness with high spatial and temporal resolution. These methods have demonstrated good diagnostic performance in clinical setting, but the reconstruction quality will degrade at high acceleration rates and overall reconstruction time remains long. In this paper, we proposed a new parallel CS reconstruction model fo…
Structural and mechanical differences between cancerous and healthy tissue give rise to variations in macroscopic properties such as visual appearance and elastic modulus that show promise as signatures for early cancer detection. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has been used to measure significant differences in stiffness between cancerous and healthy cells owing to its high force sensitivity and spatial resolution, however due to absorption and scattering of light, it is often challenging to accurately locate where AFM measurements have been made on a bulk tissue sample. In this paper we descr…
College of Physics and Information Engineering, Fuzhou University（福州大学物理与信息工程学院）；School of Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学大数据学院）；School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学生物医学工程学院）
Multi-modality medical images can provide relevant or complementary information for a target (organ, tumor or tissue). Registering multi-modality images to a common space can fuse these comprehensive information, and bring convenience for clinical application. Recently, neural networks have been widely investigated to boost registration methods. However, it is still challenging to develop a multi-modality registration network due to the lack of robust criteria for network training. In this work, we propose a multi-modality registration network (MMRegNet), which can perform registration between…
Multi-modal Liver Segmentation and Fibrosis Staging Using Real-world MRI Images
Multiscale X-ray Imaging (MXI) Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University College London（多尺度X射线成像实验室，机械工程系，伦敦大学学院）；Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh（临床脑科学中心，爱丁堡大学）；MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford（MRC韦伯尔分子医学研究所，牛津大学）
Diff4MMLiTS: Advanced Multimodal Liver Tumor Segmentation via Diffusion-Based Image Synthesis and Alignment
Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China（电子与电气工程系，南方科技大学，深圳，中国）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China（电气与电子工程系，香港大学，香港特别行政区，中国）；Department of Radiology, Zhongda Hospital, Medical School, Southeast University, Nanjing, China（放射科，中大医院，医学院，东南大学，南京，中国）；Jiaxing Research Institute, Southern University of Science and Technology, Jiaxing, China（嘉兴研究所，南方科技大学，嘉兴，中国）
In this work we propose a multi-scale recurrent encoder-decoder architecture to predict the breathing induced organ deformation in future frames. The model was trained end-to-end from input images to predict a sequence of motion labels. Targets were created by quantizing the displacement fields obtained from deformable image registration. We report results using MRI free-breathing acquisitions from 12 volunteers. Experiments were aimed at investigating the proposed multi-scale design and the effect of increasing the number of predicted frames on the overall accuracy of the model. The proposed …
PAII Inc.（PAII公司）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Chang Gung Memorial Hospital（长庚纪念医院）；Ping An Technology（平安科技）
Multi-modal image registration is a challenging problem that is also an important clinical task for many real applications and scenarios. As a first step in analysis, deformable registration among different image modalities is often required in order to provide complementary visual information. During registration, semantic information is key to match homologous points and pixels. Nevertheless, many conventional registration methods are incapable in capturing high-level semantic anatomical dense correspondences. In this work, we propose a novel multi-task learning system, JSSR, based on an end…
In conventional 2D DCE-US, motion correction algorithms take advantage of accompanying side-by-side anatomical Bmode images that contain time-stable features. However, current commercial models of 3D DCE-US do not provide side-by-side Bmode images, which makes motion correction challenging. This work introduces a novel motion correction (MC) algorithm for 3D DCE-US and assesses its efficacy when handling clinical data sets. In brief, the algorithm uses a pyramidal approach whereby short temporal windows consisting of 3-6 consecutive frames are created to perform local registrations, which are …
Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University（京都大学信息学研究科）；Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University（京都大学医学研究科）
Organ shape reconstruction based on a single-projection image during treatment has wide clinical scope, e.g., in image-guided radiotherapy and surgical guidance. We propose an image-to-graph convolutional network that achieves deformable registration of a 3D organ mesh for a single-viewpoint 2D projection image. This framework enables simultaneous training of two types of transformation: from the 2D projection image to a displacement map, and from the sampled per-vertex feature to a 3D displacement that satisfies the geometrical constraint of the mesh structure. Assuming application to radiati…
Organ motion poses an unresolved challenge in image-guided interventions. In the pursuit of solving this problem, the research field of time-resolved volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (4D MRI) has evolved. However, current techniques are unsuitable for most interventional settings because they lack sufficient temporal and/or spatial resolution or have long acquisition times. In this work, we propose a novel approach for real-time, high-resolution 4D MRI with large fields of view for MR-guided interventions. To this end, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) end-to-end to predict …
Towards Segmenting the Invisible: An End-to-End Registration and Segmentation Framework for Weakly Supervised Tumour Analysis
Institute of Technical；Business Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany Human Technopole, Milan, Italy Institute of Medical Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering；Information Technology, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany Centre for Behavioural Brain Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany
National Center for Tumor Diseases（国家肿瘤疾病中心）；University Hospital Carl-Gustav-Carus（卡尔·古斯塔夫·卡鲁斯大学医院）；TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）
Non-rigid registration is a key component in soft-tissue navigation. We focus on laparoscopic liver surgery, where we register the organ model obtained from a preoperative CT scan to the intraoperative partial organ surface, reconstructed from the laparoscopic video. This is a challenging task due to sparse and noisy intraoperative data, real-time requirements and many unknowns - such as tissue properties and boundary conditions. Furthermore, establishing correspondences between pre- and intraoperative data can be extremely difficult since the liver usually lacks distinct surface features and …
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）
Physiological motion, such as cardiac and respiratory motion, during Magnetic Resonance (MR) image acquisition can cause image artifacts. Motion correction techniques have been proposed to compensate for these types of motion during thoracic scans, relying on accurate motion estimation from undersampled motion-resolved reconstruction. A particular interest and challenge lie in the derivation of reliable non-rigid motion fields from the undersampled motion-resolved data. Motion estimation is usually formulated in image space via diffusion, parametric-spline, or optical flow methods. However, im…
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆凯特琳癌症中心）
Method: ProRSeg was trained using 5-fold cross-validation with 110 T2-weighted MRI acquired at 5 treatment fractions from 10 different patients, taking care that same patient scans were not placed in training and testing folds. Segmentation accuracy was measured using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and Hausdorff distance at 95th percentile (HD95). Registration consistency was measured using coefficient of variation (CV) in displacement of OARs. Ablation tests and accuracy comparisons against multiple methods were done. Finally, applicability of ProRSeg to segment cone-beam CT (CBCT) scans w…
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…
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University（首尔大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Radiology, Seoul National University College of Medicine（首尔大学医学院放射科）；Department of Radiology, Seoul National University Hospital（首尔大学医院放射科）；Institute of Radiation Medicine, Seoul National University Medical Research Center（首尔大学医学研究中心放射医学研究所）；Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（首尔大学人工智能跨学科项目）
The computer-aided diagnosis of focal liver lesions (FLLs) can help improve workflow and enable correct diagnoses; FLL detection is the first step in such a computer-aided diagnosis. Despite the recent success of deep-learning-based approaches in detecting FLLs, current methods are not sufficiently robust for assessing misaligned multiphase data. By introducing an attention-guided multiphase alignment in feature space, this study presents a fully automated, end-to-end learning framework for detecting FLLs from multiphase computed tomography (CT) images. Our method is robust to misaligned multi…
Background and Objective. B-spline interpolation (BSI) is a popular technique in the context of medical imaging due to its adaptability and robustness in 3D object modeling. A field that utilizes BSI is Image Guided Surgery (IGS). IGS provides navigation using medical images, which can be segmented and reconstructed into 3D models, often through BSI. Image registration tasks also use BSI to align pre-operative data to intra-operative data. However, such IGS tasks are computationally demanding, especially when applied to 3D medical images, due to the complexity and amount of data involved. Ther…
Current commercial matrix transducers for 3D DCE-US do not display side-by-side B-mode and contrast-mode images when capturing volumetric data, thus leaving the operator with no position feedback during lengthy acquisitions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of transducer tracking to provide positioning feedback and to re-align images to improve quantification. An interventional tracking system was developed in house using an infrared camera and a 3D-printed tracking target attached to a X6-1 matrix transducer. The system displays a virtual probe on a separate screen and all…
