Slide 1
An Anatomically Curated Fiber Clustering White Matter Atlas for Consistent White Matter Tract Parcellation across the Lifespan
Slide 2
An Immersive Virtual Reality Environment for Diagnostic Imaging
Slide 3
Inter-site and Inter-scanner Diffusion MRI Data Harmonization
Slide 4
The Open Anatomy Browser: A Collaborative Web-Based Viewer for Interoperable Anatomy Atlases
Slide 5
Unsupervised Discovery of Emphysema Subtypes in a Large Clinical Cohort
Slide 6
Identifying Shared Brain Networks in Individuals by Decoupling Functional and Anatomical Variability
Slide 7
Supra-Threshold Fiber Cluster Statistics for Data-Driven Whole Brain Tractography Analysis
Slide 8
Free Water Modeling of Peritumoral Edema using Multi-fiber Tractography
Slide 8
Estimation of Bounded and Unbounded Trajectories in Diffusion MRI
Slide 9
Principal Gradient of Macroscale Cortical Organization
Slide 10
Evolution of a Simultaneous Segmentation and Atlas Registration
Slide 11
Multi-modality MRI-based Atlas of the Brain
Slide 12
Intracranial Fluid Redistribution
Slide 13
Corticospinal Tract Modeling for Neurosurgical Planning by Tracking through Regions of Peritumoral Edema and Crossing Fibers
Slide 14
Automated White Matter Fiber Tract Identification in Patients with Brain Tumors
Slide 15
State-space Models of Mental Processes from fMRI
Slide 16
Robust Initialization of Active Shape Models for Lung Segmentation in CT Scans: A Feature-Based Atlas Approach
Slide 17
Tractography-driven Groupwise Multi-Scale Parcellation of the Cortex
Slide 18
Gray Matter Alterations in Early Aging
Slide 19
Statistical Shape Analysis: From Landmarks to Diffeomorphisms
Slide 20
A Generative Probabilistic Model and Discriminative Extensions for Brain Lesion Segmentation
Slide 21
Joint Modeling of Imaging and Genetic Variability
Slide 22
MR-Ultrasound Fusion for Neurosurgery
Slide 23
Diffusion MRI and Tumor Heterogeneity
Slide 24
SlicerDMRI: Open Source Diffusion MRI Software for Brain Cancer Research

Neuroimage Analysis Center

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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

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NIBIB

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

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Westin

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

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

  • Xu J, Moyer D, Gagoski B, Iglesias JE, Grant E, Golland P, Adalsteinsson E. NeSVoR: Implicit Neural Representation for Slice-to-Volume Reconstruction in MRI. IEEE transactions on medical imaging 2023;42(6):1707-1719.

    Reconstructing 3D MR volumes from multiple motion-corrupted stacks of 2D slices has shown promise in imaging of moving subjects, e. g., fetal MRI. However, existing slice-to-volume reconstruction methods are time-consuming, especially when a high-resolution volume is desired. Moreover, they are still vulnerable to severe subject motion and when image artifacts are present in acquired slices. In this work, we present NeSVoR, a resolution-agnostic slice-to-volume reconstruction method, which models the underlying volume as a continuous function of spatial coordinates with implicit neural representation. To improve robustness to subject motion and other image artifacts, we adopt a continuous and comprehensive slice acquisition model that takes into account rigid inter-slice motion, point spread function, and bias fields. NeSVoR also estimates pixel-wise and slice-wise variances of image noise and enables removal of outliers during reconstruction and visualization of uncertainty. Extensive experiments are performed on both simulated and in vivo data to evaluate the proposed method. Results show that NeSVoR achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality while providing two to ten-fold acceleration in reconstruction times over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

  • Tregidgo HFJ, Soskic S, Althonayan J, Maffei C, Van Leemput K, Golland P, Insausti R, Lerma-Usabiaga G, Caballero-Gaudes C, Paz-Alonso PM, Yendiki A, Alexander DC, Bocchetta M, Rohrer JD, Iglesias JE, Initiative A's DN. Accurate Bayesian segmentation of thalamic nuclei using diffusion MRI and an improved histological atlas. NeuroImage 2023;274:120129.

    The human thalamus is a highly connected brain structure, which is key for the control of numerous functions and is involved in several neurological disorders. Recently, neuroimaging studies have increasingly focused on the volume and connectivity of the specific nuclei comprising this structure, rather than looking at the thalamus as a whole. However, accurate identification of cytoarchitectonically designed histological nuclei on standard in vivo structural MRI is hampered by the lack of image contrast that can be used to distinguish nuclei from each other and from surrounding white matter tracts. While diffusion MRI may offer such contrast, it has lower resolution and lacks some boundaries visible in structural imaging. In this work, we present a Bayesian segmentation algorithm for the thalamus. This algorithm combines prior information from a probabilistic atlas with likelihood models for both structural and diffusion MRI, allowing segmentation of 25 thalamic labels per hemisphere informed by both modalities. We present an improved probabilistic atlas, incorporating thalamic nuclei identified from histology and 45 white matter tracts surrounding the thalamus identified in ultra-high gradient strength diffusion imaging. We present a family of likelihood models for diffusion tensor imaging, ensuring compatibility with the vast majority of neuroimaging datasets that include diffusion MRI data. The use of these diffusion likelihood models greatly improves identification of nuclear groups versus segmentation based solely on structural MRI. Dice comparison of 5 manually identifiable groups of nuclei to ground truth segmentations show improvements of up to 10 percentage points. Additionally, our chosen model shows a high degree of reliability, with median test-retest Dice scores above 0.85 for four out of five nuclei groups, whilst also offering improved detection of differential thalamic involvement in Alzheimer's disease (AUROC 81.98%). The probabilistic atlas and segmentation tool will be made publicly available as part of the neuroimaging package FreeSurfer (https://freesurfer.net/fswiki/ThalamicNucleiDTI).

  • Xu J, Moyer D, Grant E, Golland P, Iglesias JE, Adalsteinsson E. SVoRT: Iterative Transformer for Slice-to-Volume Registration in Fetal Brain MRI. Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention : MICCAI .. International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention 2022;13436:3-13.

    Volumetric reconstruction of fetal brains from multiple stacks of MR slices, acquired in the presence of almost unpredictable and often severe subject motion, is a challenging task that is highly sensitive to the initialization of slice-to-volume transformations. We propose a novel slice-to-volume registration method using Transformers trained on synthetically transformed data, which model multiple stacks of MR slices as a sequence. With the attention mechanism, our model automatically detects the relevance between slices and predicts the transformation of one slice using information from other slices. We also estimate the underlying 3D volume to assist slice-to-volume registration and update the volume and transformations alternately to improve accuracy. Results on synthetic data show that our method achieves lower registration error and better reconstruction quality compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. Experiments with real-world MRI data are also performed to demonstrate the ability of the proposed model to improve the quality of 3D reconstruction under severe fetal motion.

  • Taymourtash A, Schwartz E, Nenning K-H, Sobotka D, Licandro R, Glatter S, Diogo MC, Golland P, Grant E, Prayer D, Kasprian G, Langs G. Fetal Development of Functional Thalamocortical and Cortico-cortical Connectivity. Cerebral Cortex 2023;33(9):5613-5624.

    Measuring and understanding functional fetal brain development in utero is critical for the study of the developmental foundations of our cognitive abilities, possible early detection of disorders, and their prevention. Thalamocortical connections are an intricate component of shaping the cortical layout, but so far, only ex-vivo studies provide evidence of how axons enter the sub-plate and cortex during this highly dynamic phase. Evidence for normal in-utero development of the functional thalamocortical connectome in humans is missing. Here, we modeled fetal functional thalamocortical connectome development using in-utero functional magnetic resonance imaging in fetuses observed from 19th to 40th weeks of gestation (GW). We observed a peak increase of thalamocortical functional connectivity strength between 29th and 31st GW, right before axons establish synapses in the cortex. The cortico-cortical connectivity increases in a similar time window, and exhibits significant functional laterality in temporal-superior, -medial, and -inferior areas. Homologous regions exhibit overall similar mirrored connectivity profiles, but this similarity decreases during gestation giving way to a more diverse cortical interconnectedness. Our results complement the understanding of structural development of the human connectome and may serve as the basis for the investigation of disease and deviations from a normal developmental trajectory of connectivity development.

  • Chen Y, Zhang C, Xue T, Song Y, Makris N, Rathi Y, Cai W, Zhang F, O'Donnell LJ. Deep Fiber Clustering: Anatomically Informed Fiber Clustering with Self-supervised Deep Learning for Fast and Effective Tractography Parcellation. NeuroImage 2023;273:120086.

    White matter fiber clustering is an important strategy for white matter parcellation, which enables quantitative analysis of brain connections in health and disease. In combination with expert neuroanatomical labeling, data-driven white matter fiber clustering is a powerful tool for creating atlases that can model white matter anatomy across individuals. While widely used fiber clustering approaches have shown good performance using classical unsupervised machine learning techniques, recent advances in deep learning reveal a promising direction toward fast and effective fiber clustering. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning framework for white matter fiber clustering, Deep Fiber Clustering (DFC), which solves the unsupervised clustering problem as a self-supervised learning task with a domain-specific pretext task to predict pairwise fiber distances. This process learns a high-dimensional embedding feature representation for each fiber, regardless of the order of fiber points reconstructed during tractography. We design a novel network architecture that represents input fibers as point clouds and allows the incorporation of additional sources of input information from gray matter parcellation. Thus, DFC makes use of combined information about white matter fiber geometry and gray matter anatomy to improve the anatomical coherence of fiber clusters. In addition, DFC conducts outlier removal naturally by rejecting fibers with low cluster assignment probability. We evaluate DFC on three independently acquired cohorts, including data from 220 individuals across genders, ages (young and elderly adults), and different health conditions (healthy control and multiple neuropsychiatric disorders). We compare DFC to several state-of-the-art white matter fiber clustering algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance of DFC in terms of cluster compactness, generalization ability, anatomical coherence, and computational efficiency.