An Anatomically Curated Fiber Clustering White Matter Atlas for Consistent White Matter Tract Parcellation across the Lifespan
An Immersive Virtual Reality Environment for Diagnostic Imaging
Inter-site and Inter-scanner Diffusion MRI Data Harmonization
The Open Anatomy Browser: A Collaborative Web-Based Viewer for Interoperable Anatomy Atlases
Unsupervised Discovery of Emphysema Subtypes in a Large Clinical Cohort
Identifying Shared Brain Networks in Individuals by Decoupling Functional and Anatomical Variability
Supra-Threshold Fiber Cluster Statistics for Data-Driven Whole Brain Tractography Analysis
Free Water Modeling of Peritumoral Edema using Multi-fiber Tractography
Estimation of Bounded and Unbounded Trajectories in Diffusion MRI
Principal Gradient of Macroscale Cortical Organization
Slide 10
Evolution of a Simultaneous Segmentation and Atlas Registration
Multi-modality MRI-based Atlas of the Brain
Intracranial Fluid Redistribution
Corticospinal Tract Modeling for Neurosurgical Planning by Tracking through Regions of Peritumoral Edema and Crossing Fibers
Automated White Matter Fiber Tract Identification in Patients with Brain Tumors
State-space Models of Mental Processes from fMRI
Robust Initialization of Active Shape Models for Lung Segmentation in CT Scans: A Feature-Based Atlas Approach
Tractography-driven Groupwise Multi-Scale Parcellation of the Cortex
Gray Matter Alterations in Early Aging
Statistical Shape Analysis: From Landmarks to Diffeomorphisms
A Generative Probabilistic Model and Discriminative Extensions for Brain Lesion Segmentation
Joint Modeling of Imaging and Genetic Variability
MR-Ultrasound Fusion for Neurosurgery
Diffusion MRI and Tumor Heterogeneity
SlicerDMRI: Open Source Diffusion MRI Software for Brain Cancer Research

Neuroimage Analysis Center

The Neuroimaging Analysis Center is a research and technology center with the mission of advancing the role of neuroimaging in health care. The ability to access huge cohorts of patient medical records and radiology data, the emergence of ever-more detailed imaging modalities, and the availability of unprecedented computer processing power marks the possibility for a new era in neuroimaging, disease understanding, and patient treatment. We are excited to present a national resource center with the goal of finding new ways of extracting disease characteristics from advanced imaging and computation, and to make these methods available to the larger medical community through a proven methodology of world-class research, open-source software, and extensive collaboration.

Our Sponsor

The NAC is a Biomedical Technology Resource Center supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) (P41 EB015902). It was supported by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) (P41 RR13218) through December 2011.

Contact the Center Directors

Carl-Fredrik Westin, PhD
Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging
Brigham and Women's Hospital
1249 Boylston St., Room 240
Boston, MA 02215
Phone: +1 617 525-6209
E-mail: westin at bwh.harvard.edu
 

Ron Kikinis, MD
Surgical Planning Laboratory 
Brigham and Women's Hospital 
75 Francis St, L1 Room 050
Boston, MA 02115
Phone: +1 617 732-7389
E-mail: kikinis at bwh.harvard.edu
 

 

Recent Publications

  • Costello H, Schrag AE, Howard R, Roiser JP. Dissociable effects of dopaminergic medications on depression symptom dimensions in Parkinson disease.. Nature. Mental health. 2024;2(8):916–923. PMID: 39131186

    Depression in Parkinson disease (PD) is common, is disabling and responds poorly to standard antidepressants. Motivational symptoms of depression are particularly prevalent in PD and emerge with loss of dopaminergic innervation of the striatum. Optimizing dopaminergic treatment for PD can improve depressive symptoms. However, the differential effect of antiparkinsonian medication on symptom dimensions of depression is not known. Using data from a large (n = 412) longitudinal study of patients with newly diagnosed PD followed over 5 years, we investigated whether there are dissociable effects of dopaminergic medications on different depression symptom dimensions in PD. Previously validated 'motivation' and 'depression' dimensions were derived from the 15-item geriatric depression scale. Dopaminergic neurodegeneration was measured using repeated striatal dopamine transporter imaging. We identified dissociable associations between dopaminergic medications and different dimensions of depression in PD. Dopamine agonists were shown to be effective for treatment of motivational symptoms of depression. In contrast, monoamine oxidase-B inhibitors improved both depressive and motivation symptoms, albeit the latter effect is attenuated in patients with more severe striatal dopaminergic neurodegeneration.

  • Zhang F, Cho KIK, Seitz-Holland J, Ning L, Legarreta JH, Rathi Y, Westin CF, O’Donnell LJ, Pasternak O. DDParcel: Deep Learning Anatomical Brain Parcellation From Diffusion MRI.. IEEE transactions on medical imaging. 2024;43(3):1191–1202. PMID: 37943635

    Parcellation of anatomically segregated cortical and subcortical brain regions is required in diffusion MRI (dMRI) analysis for region-specific quantification and better anatomical specificity of tractography. Most current dMRI parcellation approaches compute the parcellation from anatomical MRI (T1- or T2-weighted) data, using tools such as FreeSurfer or CAT12, and then register it to the diffusion space. However, the registration is challenging due to image distortions and low resolution of dMRI data, often resulting in mislabeling in the derived brain parcellation. Furthermore, these approaches are not applicable when anatomical MRI data is unavailable. As an alternative we developed the Deep Diffusion Parcellation (DDParcel), a deep learning method for fast and accurate parcellation of brain anatomical regions directly from dMRI data. The input to DDParcel are dMRI parameter maps and the output are labels for 101 anatomical regions corresponding to the FreeSurfer Desikan-Killiany (DK) parcellation. A multi-level fusion network leverages complementary information in the different input maps, at three network levels: input, intermediate layer, and output. DDParcel learns the registration of diffusion features to anatomical MRI from the high-quality Human Connectome Project data. Then, to predict brain parcellation for a new subject, the DDParcel network no longer requires anatomical MRI data but only the dMRI data. Comparing DDParcel's parcellation with T1w-based parcellation shows higher test-retest reproducibility and a higher regional homogeneity, while requiring much less computational time. Generalizability is demonstrated on a range of populations and dMRI acquisition protocols. Utility of DDParcel's parcellation is demonstrated on tractography analysis for fiber tract identification.

  • Park TY, Franke L, Pieper S, Haehn D, Ning L. A review of algorithms and software for real-time electric field modeling techniques for transcranial magnetic stimulation.. Biomedical engineering letters. 2024;14(3):393–405. PMID: 38645587

    Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a device-based neuromodulation technique increasingly used to treat brain diseases. Electric field (E-field) modeling is an important technique in several TMS clinical applications, including the precision stimulation of brain targets with accurate stimulation density for the treatment of mental disorders and the localization of brain function areas for neurosurgical planning. Classical methods for E-field modeling usually take a long computation time. Fast algorithms are usually developed with significantly lower spatial resolutions that reduce the prediction accuracy and limit their usage in real-time or near real-time TMS applications. This review paper discusses several modern algorithms for real-time or near real-time TMS E-field modeling and their advantages and limitations. The reviewed methods include techniques such as basis representation techniques and deep neural-network-based methods. This paper also provides a review of software tools that can integrate E-field modeling with navigated TMS, including a recent software for real-time navigated E-field mapping based on deep neural-network models.

  • Juvekar P, Dorent R, Kögl F, Torio E, Barr C, Rigolo L, Galvin C, Jowkar N, Kazi A, Haouchine N, Cheema H, Navab N, Pieper S, Wells WM, Bi WL, Golby A, Frisken S, Kapur T. ReMIND: The Brain Resection Multimodal Imaging Database.. medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences. 2024;. PMID: 37745329

    The standard of care for brain tumors is maximal safe surgical resection. Neuronavigation augments the surgeon's ability to achieve this but loses validity as surgery progresses due to brain shift. Moreover, gliomas are often indistinguishable from surrounding healthy brain tissue. Intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging (iMRI) and ultrasound (iUS) help visualize the tumor and brain shift. iUS is faster and easier to incorporate into surgical workflows but offers a lower contrast between tumorous and healthy tissues than iMRI. With the success of data-hungry Artificial Intelligence algorithms in medical image analysis, the benefits of sharing well-curated data cannot be overstated. To this end, we provide the largest publicly available MRI and iUS database of surgically treated brain tumors, including gliomas (n=92), metastases (n=11), and others (n=11). This collection contains 369 preoperative MRI series, 320 3D iUS series, 301 iMRI series, and 356 segmentations collected from 114 consecutive patients at a single institution. This database is expected to help brain shift and image analysis research and neurosurgical training in interpreting iUS and iMRI.

  • Juvekar P, Dorent R, Kögl F, Torio E, Barr C, Rigolo L, Galvin C, Jowkar N, Kazi A, Haouchine N, Cheema H, Navab N, Pieper S, Wells WM, Bi WL, Golby A, Frisken S, Kapur T. ReMIND: The Brain Resection Multimodal Imaging Database.. Scientific data. 2024;11(1):494. PMID: 38744868

    The standard of care for brain tumors is maximal safe surgical resection. Neuronavigation augments the surgeon's ability to achieve this but loses validity as surgery progresses due to brain shift. Moreover, gliomas are often indistinguishable from surrounding healthy brain tissue. Intraoperative magnetic resonance imaging (iMRI) and ultrasound (iUS) help visualize the tumor and brain shift. iUS is faster and easier to incorporate into surgical workflows but offers a lower contrast between tumorous and healthy tissues than iMRI. With the success of data-hungry Artificial Intelligence algorithms in medical image analysis, the benefits of sharing well-curated data cannot be overstated. To this end, we provide the largest publicly available MRI and iUS database of surgically treated brain tumors, including gliomas (n = 92), metastases (n = 11), and others (n = 11). This collection contains 369 preoperative MRI series, 320 3D iUS series, 301 iMRI series, and 356 segmentations collected from 114 consecutive patients at a single institution. This database is expected to help brain shift and image analysis research and neurosurgical training in interpreting iUS and iMRI.