The large volume of material to be learned in biomedical disciplines requires optimizing the efficiency of instruction. In prior work with computer-based instruction of neuroanatomy, it was relatively efficient for learners to master whole anatomy and then transfer to learning sectional anatomy. It may, however, be more efficient to continuously integrate learning of whole and sectional anatomy. A study of computer-based learning of neuroanatomy was conducted to compare a basic transfer paradigm for learning whole and sectional neuroanatomy with a method in which the two forms of representation were interleaved (alternated). For all experimental groups, interactive computer programs supported an approach to instruction called adaptive exploration. Each learning trial consisted of time-limited exploration of neuroanatomy, self-timed testing, and graphical feedback. The primary result of this study was that interleaved learning of whole and sectional neuroanatomy was more efficient than the basic transfer method, without cost to long-term retention or generalization of knowledge to recognizing new images (Visible Human and MRI).

OBJECTIVE: EEG source localization is demonstrated in three cases of acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) with progressive lesion loads using anatomically faithful models of the head which account for pathology. METHODS: Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) volumes were used to generate head models via the finite element method (FEM). A total of 25 tissue types-including 6 types accounting for pathology-were included. To determine the effects of TBI upon source localization accuracy, a minimum-norm operator was used to perform inverse localization and to determine the accuracy of the latter. RESULTS: The importance of using a more comprehensive number of tissue types is confirmed in both health and in TBI. Pathology omission is found to cause substantial inaccuracies in EEG forward matrix calculations, with lead field sensitivity being underestimated by as much as ≈ 200% in (peri-) contusional regions when TBI-related changes are ignored. Failing to account for such conductivity changes is found to misestimate substantial localization error by up to 35 mm. CONCLUSIONS: Changes in head conductivity profiles should be accounted for when performing EEG modeling in acute TBI. SIGNIFICANCE: Given the challenges of inverse localization in TBI, this framework can benefit neurotrauma patients by providing useful insights on pathophysiology.

This paper presents a new distance for measuring shape dissimilarity between objects. Recent publications introduced the use of eigenvalues of the Laplace operator as compact shape descriptors. Here, we revisit the eigenvalues to define a proper distance, called Weighted Spectral Distance (WESD), for quantifying shape dissimilarity. The definition of WESD is derived through analyzing the heat trace. This analysis provides the proposed distance with an intuitive meaning and mathematically links it to the intrinsic geometry of objects. We analyze the resulting distance definition, present and prove its important theoretical properties. Some of these properties include: 1) WESD is defined over the entire sequence of eigenvalues yet it is guaranteed to converge, 2) it is a pseudometric, 3) it is accurately approximated with a finite number of eigenvalues, and 4) it can be mapped to the [0,1) interval. Last, experiments conducted on synthetic and real objects are presented. These experiments highlight the practical benefits of WESD for applications in vision and medical image analysis.

This paper presents feature-based alignment (FBA), a general method for efficient and robust model-to-image alignment. Volumetric images, e.g. CT scans of the human body, are modeled probabilistically as a collage of 3D scale-invariant image features within a normalized reference space. Features are incorporated as a latent random variable and marginalized out in computing a maximum a-posteriori alignment solution. The model is learned from features extracted in pre-aligned training images, then fit to features extracted from a new image to identify a globally optimal locally linear alignment solution. Novel techniques are presented for determining local feature orientation and efficiently encoding feature intensity in 3D. Experiments involving difficult magnetic resonance (MR) images of the human brain demonstrate FBA achieves alignment accuracy similar to widely-used registration methods, while requiring a fraction of the memory and computation resources and offering a more robust, globally optimal solution. Experiments on CT human body scans demonstrate FBA as an effective system for automatic human body alignment where other alignment methods break down.

Open-source software provides an economic benefit by reducing duplicated development effort, and advances science knowledge by fostering a culture of reproducible experimentation. This paper describes recent advances in the Plastimatch open software suite, which implements a broad set of useful tools for research and practice in radiotherapy and medical imaging. The focus of this paper is to highlight recent advancements, including 2D-3D registration, GPU-accelerated mutual information, analytic regularization of B-spline registration, automatic 3D feature detection and feature matching, and radiotherapy plan evaluation tools.

Identifying patterns from the neuroimaging recordings of brain activity related to the unobservable psychological or mental state of an individual can be treated as a unsupervised pattern recognition problem. The main challenges, however, for such an analysis of fMRI data are: a) defining a physiologically meaningful feature-space for representing the spatial patterns across time; b) dealing with the high-dimensionality of the data; and c) robustness to the various artifacts and confounds in the fMRI time-series. In this paper, we present a network-aware feature-space to represent the states of a general network, that enables comparing and clustering such states in a manner that is a) meaningful in terms of the network connectivity structure; b)computationally efficient; c) low-dimensional; and d) relatively robust to structured and random noise artifacts. This feature-space is obtained from a spherical relaxation of the transportation distance metric which measures the cost of trans- porting “mass over the network to transform one function into another. Through theoretical and empirical assessments, we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the approximation, especially for large problems.

PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate image registration methodology for automated re-identification of tumor-suspicious foci from preprocedural MR exams during MR-guided transperineal prostate core biopsy. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A hierarchical approach for automated registration between planning and intra-procedural T2-weighted prostate MRI was developed and evaluated on the images acquired during 10 consecutive MR-guided biopsies. Registration accuracy was quantified at image-based landmarks and by evaluating spatial overlap for the manually segmented prostate and sub-structures. Registration reliability was evaluated by simulating initial mis-registration and analyzing the convergence behavior. Registration precision was characterized at the planned biopsy targets. RESULTS: The total computation time was compatible with a clinical setting, being at most 2 min. Deformable registration led to a significant improvement in spatial overlap of the prostate and peripheral zone contours compared with both rigid and affine registration. Average in-slice landmark registration error was 1.3 ± 0.5 mm. Experiments simulating initial mis-registration resulted in an estimated average capture range of 6 mm and an average in-slice registration precision of ±0.3 mm. CONCLUSION: Our registration approach requires minimum user interaction and is compatible with the time constraints of our interventional clinical workflow. The initial evaluation shows acceptable accuracy, reliability and consistency of the method.

Patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) who require mechanical ventilation due to acute respiratory failure also frequently require the administration of sedative agents. The need for sedation arises both from patient anxiety due to the loss of personal control and the unfamiliar and intrusive environment of the ICU, and also due to pain or other variants of noxious stimuli. While physicians select the agent(s) used for sedation and cardiovascular function, the actual administration of these agents is the responsibility of the nursing staff. If clinical decision support systems and closed-loop control systems could be developed for critical care monitoring and lifesaving interventions as well as the administration of sedation and cardiopulmonary management, the ICU nurse could be released from the intense monitoring of sedation, allowing her/him to focus on other critical tasks. One particularly attractive strategy is to utilize the knowledge and experience of skilled clinicians, capturing explicitly the rules expert clinicians use to decide on how to titrate drug doses depending on the level of sedation. In this paper, we extend the deterministic rule-based expert system for cardiopulmonary management and ICU sedation framework presented in [1] to a stochastic setting by using probability theory to quantify uncertainty and hence deal with more realistic clinical situations.

We present what we believe to be the first investigation into unbiased multi-subject registration of whole brain diffusion tractography of the white matter. To our knowledge, this is also the first entropy-based objective function applied to fiber tract registration. To define the probability of fiber trajectories for the computation of entropy, we take advantage of a pairwise fiber distance used as the basis for a Gaussian-like kernel. By employing several values of the kernel’s scale parameter, the method is inherently multi-scale. Results of experiments using synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the potential of the method for simultaneous joint registration of tractography.