Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) has been extensively used to study the microarchitecture of white matter in schizophrenia. However, popular DWI-derived measures such as fractional anisotropy (FA) may be sensitive to many types of pathologies, and thus the interpretation of reported differences in these measures remains difficult. Combining DWI with magnetization transfer ratio (MTR) - a putative measure of white matter myelination - can help us reveal the underlying mechanisms. Previous findings hypothesized that MTR differences in schizophrenia are associated with free water concentrations, which also affect the DWIs. In this study we use a recently proposed DWI-derived method called free-water imaging to assess this hypothesis. We have reanalyzed data from a previous study by using a fiber-based analysis of free-water imaging, providing a free-water fraction, as well as mean diffusivity and FA corrected for free-water, in addition to MTR along twelve major white matter fiber bundles in 40 schizophrenia patients and 40 healthy controls. We tested for group differences in each fiber bundle and for each measure separately and computed correlations between the MTR and the DWI-derived measures separately for both groups. Significant higher average MTR values in patients were found for the right uncinate fasciculus, the right arcuate fasciculus and the right inferior-frontal occipital fasciculus. No significant results were found for the other measures. No significant differences in correlations were found between MTR and the DWI-derived measures. The results suggest that MTR and free-water imaging measures can be considered complementary, promoting the acquisition of MTR in addition to DWI to identify group differences, as well as to better understand the underlying mechanisms in schizophrenia.

The accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is essential for patient care and will be increasingly important as disease modifying agents become available, early in the course of the disease. Although studies have applied machine learning methods for the computer-aided diagnosis of AD, a bottleneck in the diagnostic performance was shown in previous methods, due to the lacking of efficient strategies for representing neuroimaging biomarkers. In this study, we designed a novel diagnostic framework with deep learning architecture to aid the diagnosis of AD. This framework uses a zero-masking strategy for data fusion to extract complementary information from multiple data modalities. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art workflows, our method is capable of fusing multimodal neuroimaging features in one setting and has the potential to require less labeled data. A performance gain was achieved in both binary classification and multiclass classification of AD. The advantages and limitations of the proposed framework are discussed.

This Head and Neck Atlas has been made available by the Surgical Planning Laboratory at Brigham and Women s Hospital. The data set consists of: 1. Reduced resolution (256x256) of the MANIX data set from the OSIRIX data sets. 2. A set of detailed label maps. 3. A set of three-dimensional models of the labeled anatomical structures. 4. Several pre-defined Scene Views (“anatomy teaching files”). 5. Annotation as supplementary information associated with a scene. 6. Anatomical model hierarchy. All in a mrb (Medical Reality Bundle) archive file that contains the mrml scene file and all data for loading into Slicer 4 for displaying the volumes in 3D Slicer version 4.0 or greater, available for download. The atlas data is made available under terms of the 3D Slicer License section B.This work is funded as part of the Neuroimaging Analysis Center, grant number P41 EB015902, by the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the Google Faculty Research Award.Contributors: Neha Agrawal, Matthew D Artista, Susan Kikinis, Dashawn Richardson, Daniel Sachs.This atlas maybe viewed with our Open Anatomy Browser.

One key pitfall in diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) clinical neuroimaging research is the challenge of understanding and interpreting the results of a complex analysis pipeline. The sophisticated algorithms employed by the analysis software, combined with the relatively non-specific nature of many diffusion measurements, lead to challenges in interpretation of the results. This paper is aimed at an intended audience of clinical researchers who are learning about dMRI or trying to interpret dMRI results, and who may be wondering "Does dMRI tell us anything about the white matter?" We present a critical review of dMRI methods and measures used in clinical neuroimaging research, focusing on the most commonly used analysis methods and the most commonly reported measures. We describe important pitfalls in every section, and provide extensive references for the reader interested in more detail.

PURPOSE: Reliably detecting MRI signals in the brain that are more tightly coupled to neural activity than blood-oxygen-level-dependent fMRI signals could not only prove valuable for basic scientific research but could also enhance clinical applications such as epilepsy presurgical mapping. This endeavor will likely benefit from an improved understanding of the behavior of ionic currents, the mediators of neural activity, in the presence of the strong magnetic fields that are typical of modern-day MRI scanners. THEORY: Of the various mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the behavior of ionic volume currents in a magnetic field, only one-magnetohydrodynamic flow-predicts a slow evolution of signals, on the order of a minute for normal saline in a typical MRI scanner. METHODS: This prediction was tested by scanning a volume-current phantom containing normal saline with gradient-echo-planar imaging at 3 T. RESULTS: Greater signal changes were observed in the phase of the images than in the magnitude, with the changes evolving on the order of a minute. CONCLUSION: These results provide experimental support for the MHD flow hypothesis. Furthermore, MHD-driven cerebrospinal fluid flow could provide a novel fMRI contrast mechanism.

The Surgical Planning Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, developed the SPL Knee Atlas. The atlas was derived from a MRI scan, using semi-automated image segmentation and three-dimensional reconstruction techniques. The current version consists of: 1. the original MRI scan; 2. a set of detailed label maps; 3. a set of three-dimensional models of the labeled anatomical structures; 4. a mrml-file that allows loading all of the data into the 3D Slicer for visualization. 5. several pre-defined 3D views (“anatomy teaching files”). The SPL Knee Atlas provides important reference information for anatomy teaching, and template driven segmentation. Visualization of the data requires Slicer 3. This software package can be downloaded from here. We are pleased to make this atlas available to our colleagues for free download. Please note that the data is being distributed under the Slicer license. By downloading these data, you agree to acknowledge our contribution in any of your publications that result form the use of this atlas. The Slicer4 version archived in a mrb (Medical Reality Bundle) file that contains the mrml scene file and all data for loading into Slicer 4 for displaying the volumes in 3D Slicer version 4.0 or greater, available for download.This work is funded as part of the Neuroimaging Analysis Center, grant number P41 RR013218, by the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and grant number P41 EB015902, by the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the Google Faculty Research Award.Contributors: Matthew D’Artista, Alex Kikinis.This atlas maybe viewed with our Open Anatomy Browser.

The Surgical Planning Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, developed the SPL Abdominal Atlas. The atlas was derived from a computed tomography (CT) scan, using semi-automated image segmentation and three-dimensional reconstruction techniques. The current version consists of: 1. the original CT scan; 2. a set of detailed label maps; 3. a set of three-dimensional models of the labeled anatomical structures; 4. a mrml-file that allows loading all of the data into the 3D Slicer for visualization (see the tutorial associated with the atlas); 5. several pre-defined 3D-views ( anatomy teaching files ). The SPL Abdominal Atlas provides important reference information for surgical planning, anatomy teaching, and template driven segmentation. Visualization of the data requires Slicer 3. This software package can be downloaded from here. We are pleased to make this atlas available to our colleagues for free download. Please note that the data is being distributed under the Slicer license. By downloading these data, you agree to acknowledge our contribution in any of your publications that result form the use of this atlas. The Slicer4 version archived in a mrb (Medical Reality Bundle) file that contains the mrml scene file and all data for loading into Slicer 4 for displaying the volumes in 3D Slicer version 4.0 or greater, available for download.This work is funded as part of the Neuroimaging Analysis Center, grant number P41 RR013218, by the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and grant number P41 EB015902, by the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the Google Faculty Research Award.Contributors: Matthew D’Artista, Alex Kikinis, Tobias Schmidt, Svenja van der Gaag.This atlas maybe viewed with our Open Anatomy Browser.

Deformable image registration (DIR) is one of the major problems in medical image processing, such as dose calculation [18], treatment planning [33] and scatter removal of cone beam CT (CBCT) [22]. It is of prime importance to establish a pixel-to-pixel correspondence between two images in many clinical scenarios. For instance, registration of a CT image to MRI of a patient taken at different time can provide complementary diagnostic information. For applications as such, since the deformation of the patient anatomy cannot be represented by a rigid transform, DIR is almost the sole means to establish this mapping. DIR can be generally categorized into intra-modality and inter-modality, or multi-modality. While intra-modality DIR can be easily handled by conventional intensity-based methods [11, 30], intermodality DIR problems are still far from being satisfactory. Yet, since different imaging modalities usually provide their unique angles to reveal patient anatomy and delineate microscopic disease, intermodality registration plays a key role to combine the information from multiple modalities to facilitate diagnostics and treatment of a certain disease.

Feature learning with high dimensional neuroimaging features has been explored for the applications on neurodegenerative diseases. Low-dimensional biomarkers, such as mental status test scores and cerebrospinal fluid level, are essential in clinical diagnosis of neurological disorders, because they could be simple and effective for the clinicians to assess the disorder’s progression and severity. Rather than only using the low-dimensional biomarkers as inputs for decision making systems, we believe that such low-dimensional biomarkers can be used for enhancing the feature learning pipeline. In this study, we proposed a novel feature representation learning framework, Multi-Phase Feature Representation (MPFR), with low-dimensional biomarkers embedded. MPFR learns high-level neuroimaging features by extracting the associations between the low-dimensional biomarkers and the highdimensional neuroimaging features with a deep neural network. We validated the proposed framework using the Mini-Mental-State-Examination (MMSE) scores as a low-dimensional biomarker and multi-modal neuroimaging data as the high-dimensional neuroimaging features from the ADNI baseline cohort. The proposed approach outperformed the original neural network in both binary and ternary Alzheimer’s disease classification tasks.