Luo J, Toews M, Machado I, Frisken S, Zhang M, Preiswerk F, Sedghi A, Ding H, Pieper S, Golland P, et al. A Feature-Driven Active Framework for Ultrasound-Based Brain Shift Compensation, in
MICCAI 2018. Vol LNCS 11073. Granada, Spain: Springer ; 2018 :30-38.
AbstractA reliable Ultrasound (US)-to-US registration method to compensate for brain shift would substantially improve Image-Guided Neurological Surgery. Developing such a registration method is very challenging, due to factors such as the tumor resection, the complexity of brain pathology and the demand for fast computation. We propose a novel feature-driven active registration framework. Here, landmarks and their displacement are first estimated from a pair of US images using corresponding local image features. Subsequently, a Gaussian Process (GP) model is used to interpolate a dense deformation field from the sparse landmarks. Kernels of the GP are estimated by using variograms and a discrete grid search method. If necessary, the user can actively add new landmarks based on the image context and visualization of the uncertainty measure provided by the GP to further improve the result. We retrospectively demonstrate our registration framework as a robust and accurate brain shift compensation solution on clinical data.
Luo MICCAI 2018 Pace DF, Dalca AV, Brosch T, Geva T, Powell AJ, Weese J, Moghari MH, Golland P.
Iterative Segmentation from Limited Training Data: Applications to Congenital Heart Disease. Deep Learn Med Image Anal Multimodal Learn Clin Decis Support (2018). 2018;11045 :334-42.
AbstractWe propose a new iterative segmentation model which can be accurately learned from a small dataset. A common approach is to train a model to directly segment an image, requiring a large collection of manually annotated images to capture the anatomical variability in a cohort. In contrast, we develop a segmentation model that recursively evolves a segmentation in several steps, and implement it as a recurrent neural network. We learn model parameters by optimizing the intermediate steps of the evolution in addition to the final segmentation. To this end, we train our segmentation propagation model by presenting incomplete and/or inaccurate input segmentations paired with a recommended next step. Our work aims to alleviate challenges in segmenting heart structures from cardiac MRI for patients with congenital heart disease (CHD), which encompasses a range of morphological deformations and topological changes. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach on a dataset of 20 images from CHD patients, learning a model that accurately segments individual heart chambers and great vessels. Compared to direct segmentation, the iterative method yields more accurate segmentation for patients with the most severe CHD malformations.
Wang J, Wells WM, Golland P, Zhang M.
Efficient Laplace Approximation for Bayesian Registration Uncertainty Quantification. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2018;11070 :880-8.
AbstractThis paper presents a novel approach to modeling the pos terior distribution in image registration that is computationally efficient for large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM). We develop a Laplace approximation of Bayesian registration models entirely in a bandlimited space that fully describes the properties of diffeomorphic transformations. In contrast to current methods, we compute the inverse Hessian at the mode of the posterior distribution of diffeomorphisms directly in the low dimensional frequency domain. This dramatically reduces the computational complexity of approximating posterior marginals in the high dimensional imaging space. Experimental results show that our method is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art diffeomorphic image registration uncertainty quantification algorithms, while producing comparable results. The efficiency of our method strengthens the feasibility in prospective clinical applications, e.g., real- time image-guided navigation for brain surgery.
Dalca AV, Bouman KL, Freeman WT, Rost NS, Sabuncu MR, Golland P.
Medical Image Imputation from Image Collections. IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2018.
AbstractWe present an algorithm for creating high resolution anatomically plausible images consistent with acquired clinical brain MRI scans with large inter-slice spacing. Although large data sets of clinical images contain a wealth of information, time constraints during acquisition result in sparse scans that fail to capture much of the anatomy. These characteristics often render computational analysis impractical as many image analysis algorithms tend to fail when applied to such images. Highly specialized algorithms that explicitly handle sparse slice spacing do not generalize well across problem domains. In contrast, we aim to enable application of existing algorithms that were originally developed for high resolution research scans to significantly undersampled scans. We introduce a generative model that captures fine-scale anatomical structure across subjects in clinical image collections and derive an algorithm for filling in the missing data in scans with large inter-slice spacing. Our experimental results demonstrate that the resulting method outperforms state-of-the-art upsampling super-resolution techniques, and promises to facilitate subsequent analysis not previously possible with scans of this quality. Our implementation is freely available at
https://github.com/adalca/papago.
Luo J, Frisken S, Machado I, Zhang M, Pieper S, Golland P, Toews M, Unadkat P, Sedghi A, Zhou H, et al. Using the Variogram for Vector Outlier Screening: Application to Feature-based Image Registration. Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg. 2018;13 (12) :1871-80.
AbstractPURPOSE: Matching points that are derived from features or landmarks in image data is a key step in some medical imaging applications. Since most robust point matching algorithms claim to be able to deal with outliers, users may place high confidence in the matching result and use it without further examination. However, for tasks such as feature-based registration in image-guided neurosurgery, even a few mismatches, in the form of invalid displacement vectors, could cause serious consequences. As a result, having an effective tool by which operators can manually screen all matches for outliers could substantially benefit the outcome of those applications. METHODS: We introduce a novel variogram-based outlier screening method for vectors. The variogram is a powerful geostatistical tool for characterizing the spatial dependence of stochastic processes. Since the spatial correlation of invalid displacement vectors, which are considered as vector outliers, tends to behave differently than normal displacement vectors, they can be efficiently identified on the variogram. RESULTS: We validate the proposed method on 9 sets of clinically acquired ultrasound data. In the experiment, potential outliers are flagged on the variogram by one operator and further evaluated by 8 experienced medical imaging researchers. The matching quality of those potential outliers is approximately 1.5 lower, on a scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (good), than valid displacement vectors. CONCLUSION: The variogram is a simple yet informative tool. While being used extensively in geostatistical analysis, it has not received enough attention in the medical imaging field. We believe there is a good deal of potential for clinically applying the proposed outlier screening method. By way of this paper, we also expect researchers to find variogram useful in other medical applications that involve motion vectors analyses.