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

  • Dambreville S, Rathi Y, Tannenbaum A. Shape-Based Approach to Robust Image Segmentation using Kernel PCA. Proc IEEE Comput Soc Conf Comput Vis Pattern Recognit 2006;:977-984.
    Segmentation involves separating an object from the background. In this work, we propose a novel segmentation method combining image information with prior shape knowledge, within the level-set framework. Following the work of Leventon et al., we revisit the use of principal component analysis (PCA) to introduce prior knowledge about shapes in a more robust manner. To this end, we utilize Kernel PCA and show that this method of learning shapes outperforms linear PCA, by allowing only shapes that are close enough to the training data. In the proposed segmentation algorithm, shape knowledge and image information are encoded into two energy functionals entirely described in terms of shapes. This consistent description allows to fully take advantage of the Kernel PCA methodology and leads to promising segmentation results. In particular, our shape-driven segmentation technique allows for the simultaneous encoding of multiple types of shapes, and offers a convincing level of robustness with respect to noise, clutter, partial occlusions, or smearing.
  • The ability to analyze and merge data across sites, vendors, and field strengths depends on one’s ability to acquire images with the same image quality including image smoothness, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR). SNR can be used to compare different magnetic resonance scanners as a measure of comparability between the systems. This study looks at the SNR and CNR ratios in structural fast spin-echo T2-weighted scans acquired in five individuals across ten sites that are part of Functional Imaging Research of Schizophrenia Testbed Biomedical Informatics Research Network (fBIRN). Different manufacturers, field strengths, gradient coils, and RF coils were used at these sites. The SNR of gray matter was fairly uniform (41.3-43.3) across scanners at 1.5 T. The higher field scanners produced images with significantly higher SNR values (44.5-108.7 at 3 T and 50.8 at 4 T). Similar results were obtained for CNR measurements between gray/white matter at 1.5 T (9.5-10.2), again increasing at higher fields (10.1-28.9 at 3 T and 10.9 at 4 T).
  • Angenent S, Pichon E, Tannenbaum A. MATHEMATICAL METHODS IN MEDICAL IMAGE PROCESSING. Bull New Ser Am Math Soc 2006;43:365-396.
    In this paper, we describe some central mathematical problems in medical imaging. The subject has been undergoing rapid changes driven by better hardware and software. Much of the software is based on novel methods utilizing geometric partial differential equations in conjunction with standard signal/image processing techniques as well as computer graphics facilitating man/machine interactions. As part of this enterprise, researchers have been trying to base biomedical engineering principles on rigorous mathematical foundations for the development of software methods to be integrated into complete therapy delivery systems. These systems support the more effective delivery of many image-guided procedures such as radiation therapy, biopsy, and minimally invasive surgery. We will show how mathematics may impact some of the main problems in this area, including image enhancement, registration, and segmentation.
  • Michailovich O, Tannenbaum A. Despeckling of medical ultrasound images. IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control 2006;53(1):64-78.
    Speckle noise is an inherent property of medical ultrasound imaging, and it generally tends to reduce the image resolution and contrast, thereby reducing the diagnostic value of this imaging modality. As a result, speckle noise reduction is an important prerequisite, whenever ultrasound imaging is used for tissue characterization. Among the many methods that have been proposed to perform this task, there exists a class of approaches that use a multiplicative model of speckled image formation and take advantage of the logarithmical transformation in order to convert multiplicative speckle noise into additive noise. The common assumption made in a dominant number of such studies is that the samples of the additive noise are mutually uncorrelated and obey a Gaussian distribution. The present study shows conceptually and experimentally that this assumption is oversimplified and unnatural. Moreover, it may lead to inadequate performance of the speckle reduction methods. The study introduces a simple preprocessing procedure, which modifies the acquired radio-frequency images (without affecting the anatomical information they contain), so that the noise in the log-transformation domain becomes very close in its behavior to a white Gaussian noise. As a result, the preprocessing allows filtering methods based on assuming the noise to be white and Gaussian, to perform in nearly optimal conditions. The study evaluates performances of three different, nonlinear filters—wavelet denoising, total variation filtering, and anisotropic diffusion—and demonstrates that, in all these cases, the proposed preprocessing significantly improves the quality of resultant images. Our numerical tests include a series of computer-simulated and in vivo experiments.
  • Talos I-F, Mian AZ, Zou KH, Hsu L, Goldberg-Zimring D, Haker S, Bhagwat JG, Mulkern R. Magnetic resonance and the human brain: anatomy, function and metabolism. Cell Mol Life Sci 2006;63(10):1106-24.
    The introduction and development, over the last three decades, of magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and MR spectroscopy technology for in vivo studies of the human brain represents a truly remarkable achievement, with enormous scientific and clinical ramifications. These effectively non-invasive techniques allow for studies of the anatomy, the function and the metabolism of the living human brain. They have allowed for new understandings of how the healthy brain works and have provided insights into the mechanisms underlying multiple disease processes which affect the brain. Different MR techniques have been developed for studying anatomy, function and metabolism. The primary focus of this review is to describe these different methodologies and to briefly review how they are being employed to more fully appreciate the intricacies associated with the organ, which most distinctly differentiates the human species from the other animal forms on earth.