Designed especially for neurobiologists, FluoRender is an interactive tool for multi-channel fluorescence microscopy data visualization and analysis.
Deep brain stimulation
BrainStimulator is a set of networks that are used in SCIRun to perform simulations of brain stimulation such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and magnetic transcranial stimulation (TMS).
Developing software tools for science has always been a central vision of the SCI Institute.

SCI Publications

2013


M. Farzinfar, Y. Li, A.R. Verde, I. Oguz, G. Gerig, M.A. Styner. “DTI Quality Control Assessment via Error Estimation From Monte Carlo Simulations,” In Proceedings of SPIE 8669, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing, Vol. 8669, 2013.
DOI: 10.1117/12.2006925
PubMed ID: 23833547
PubMed Central ID: PMC3702180

ABSTRACT

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is currently the state of the art method for characterizing the microscopic tissue structure of white matter in normal or diseased brain in vivo. DTI is estimated from a series of Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) volumes. DWIs suffer from a number of artifacts which mandate stringent Quality Control (QC) schemes to eliminate lower quality images for optimal tensor estimation. Conventionally, QC procedures exclude artifact-affected DWIs from subsequent computations leading to a cleaned, reduced set of DWIs, called DWI-QC. Often, a rejection threshold is heuristically/empirically chosen above which the entire DWI-QC data is rendered unacceptable and thus no DTI is computed. In this work, we have devised a more sophisticated, Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation based method for the assessment of resulting tensor properties. This allows for a consistent, error-based threshold definition in order to reject/accept the DWI-QC data. Specifically, we propose the estimation of two error metrics related to directional distribution bias of Fractional Anisotropy (FA) and the Principal Direction (PD). The bias is modeled from the DWI-QC gradient information and a Rician noise model incorporating the loss of signal due to the DWI exclusions. Our simulations further show that the estimated bias can be substantially different with respect to magnitude and directional distribution depending on the degree of spatial clustering of the excluded DWIs. Thus, determination of diffusion properties with minimal error requires an evenly distributed sampling of the gradient directions before and after QC.



M. Farzinfar, I. Oguz, R.G. Smith, A.R. Verde, C. Dietrich, A. Gupta, M.L. Escolar, J. Piven, S. Pujol, C. Vachet, S. Gouttard, G. Gerig, S. Dager, R.C. McKinstry, S. Paterson, A.C. Evans, M.A. Styner. “Diffusion imaging quality control via entropy of principal direction distribution,” In NeuroImage, Vol. 82, pp. 1--12. 2013.
ISSN: 1053-8119
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.05.022

ABSTRACT

Diffusion MR imaging has received increasing attention in the neuroimaging community, as it yields new insights into the microstructural organization of white matter that are not available with conventional MRI techniques. While the technology has enormous potential, diffusion MRI suffers from a unique and complex set of image quality problems, limiting the sensitivity of studies and reducing the accuracy of findings. Furthermore, the acquisition time for diffusion MRI is longer than conventional MRI due to the need for multiple acquisitions to obtain directionally encoded Diffusion Weighted Images (DWI). This leads to increased motion artifacts, reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and increased proneness to a wide variety of artifacts, including eddy-current and motion artifacts, “venetian blind” artifacts, as well as slice-wise and gradient-wise inconsistencies. Such artifacts mandate stringent Quality Control (QC) schemes in the processing of diffusion MRI data. Most existing QC procedures are conducted in the DWI domain and/or on a voxel level, but our own experiments show that these methods often do not fully detect and eliminate certain types of artifacts, often only visible when investigating groups of DWI's or a derived diffusion model, such as the most-employed diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Here, we propose a novel regional QC measure in the DTI domain that employs the entropy of the regional distribution of the principal directions (PD). The PD entropy quantifies the scattering and spread of the principal diffusion directions and is invariant to the patient's position in the scanner. High entropy value indicates that the PDs are distributed relatively uniformly, while low entropy value indicates the presence of clusters in the PD distribution. The novel QC measure is intended to complement the existing set of QC procedures by detecting and correcting residual artifacts. Such residual artifacts cause directional bias in the measured PD and here called dominant direction artifacts. Experiments show that our automatic method can reliably detect and potentially correct such artifacts, especially the ones caused by the vibrations of the scanner table during the scan. The results further indicate the usefulness of this method for general quality assessment in DTI studies.

Keywords: Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging, Diffusion tensor imaging, Quality assessment, Entropy



J. Fishbaugh, M.W. Prastawa, G. Gerig, S. Durrleman. “Geodesic Shape Regression in the Framework of Currents,” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI), Vol. 23, pp. 718--729. 2013.
PubMed ID: 24684012
PubMed Central ID: PMC4127488

ABSTRACT

Shape regression is emerging as an important tool for the statistical analysis of time dependent shapes. In this paper, we develop a new generative model which describes shape change over time, by extending simple linear regression to the space of shapes represented as currents in the large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping (LDDMM) framework. By analogy with linear regression, we estimate a baseline shape (intercept) and initial momenta (slope) which fully parameterize the geodesic shape evolution. This is in contrast to previous shape regression methods which assume the baseline shape is fixed. We further leverage a control point formulation, which provides a discrete and low dimensional parameterization of large diffeomorphic transformations. This flexible system decouples the parameterization of deformations from the specific shape representation, allowing the user to define the dimension- ality of the deformation parameters. We present an optimization scheme that estimates the baseline shape, location of the control points, and initial momenta simultaneously via a single gradient descent algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate our proposed method on synthetic data as well as real anatomical shape complexes.



J. Fishbaugh, M. Prastawa, G. Gerig, S. Durrleman. “Geodesic image regression with a sparse parameterization of diffeomorphisms,” In Geometric Science of Information Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), In Proceedings of the Geometric Science of Information Conference (GSI), Vol. 8085, pp. 95--102. 2013.

ABSTRACT

Image regression allows for time-discrete imaging data to be modeled continuously, and is a crucial tool for conducting statistical analysis on longitudinal images. Geodesic models are particularly well suited for statistical analysis, as image evolution is fully characterized by a baseline image and initial momenta. However, existing geodesic image regression models are parameterized by a large number of initial momenta, equal to the number of image voxels. In this paper, we present a sparse geodesic image regression framework which greatly reduces the number of model parameters. We combine a control point formulation of deformations with a L1 penalty to select the most relevant subset of momenta. This way, the number of model parameters reflects the complexity of anatomical changes in time rather than the sampling of the image. We apply our method to both synthetic and real data and show that we can decrease the number of model parameters (from the number of voxels down to hundreds) with only minimal decrease in model accuracy. The reduction in model parameters has the potential to improve the power of ensuing statistical analysis, which faces the challenging problem of high dimensionality.



S.H. Kim, V. Fonov, C. Dietrich, C. Vachet, H.C. Hazlett, R.G. Smith, M. Graves, J. Piven, J.H. Gilmore, D.L. Collins, G. Gerig, M. Styner, The IBIS network. “Adaptive prior probability and spatial temporal intensity change estimation for segmentation of the one-year-old human brain,” In Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Vol. 212, No. 1, Note: Published online Sept. 29, pp. 43--55. January, 2013.
DOI: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2012.09.01
PubMed Central ID: PMC3513941

ABSTRACT

The degree of white matter (WM) myelination is rather inhomogeneous across the brain. White matter appears differently across the cortical lobes in MR images acquired during early postnatal development. Specifically at 1-year of age, the gray/white matter contrast of MR T1 and T2 weighted images in prefrontal and temporal lobes is reduced as compared to the rest of the brain, and thus, tissue segmentation results commonly show lower accuracy in these lobes. In this novel work, we propose the use of spatial intensity growth maps (IGM) for T1 and T2 weighted images to compensate for local appearance inhomogeneity. The IGM captures expected intensity changes from 1 to 2 years of age, as appearance homogeneity is greatly improved by the age of 24 months. The IGM was computed as the coefficient of a voxel-wise linear regression model between corresponding intensities at 1 and 2 years. The proposed IGM method revealed low regression values of 1–10\% in GM and CSF regions, as well as in WM regions at maturation stage of myelination at 1 year. However, in the prefrontal and temporal lobes we observed regression values of 20–25\%, indicating that the IGM appropriately captures the expected large intensity change in these lobes mainly due to myelination. The IGM is applied to cross-sectional MRI datasets of 1-year-old subjects via registration, correction and tissue segmentation of the IGM-corrected dataset. We validated our approach in a small leave-one-out study of images with known, manual 'ground truth' segmentations.



R.K. McClure, M. Styner, J.A. Lieberman, S. Gouttard, G. Gerig, X. Shi, H. Zhu. “Localized differences in caudate and hippocampal shape associated with schizophrenia but not antipsychotic type,” In Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Vol. 211, No. 1, pp. 1--10. January, 2013.
DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2012.07.001
PubMed Central ID: PMC3557605

ABSTRACT

Caudate and hippocampal volume differences in patients with schizophrenia are associated with disease and antipsychotic treatment, but local shape alterations have not been thoroughly examined. Schizophrenia patients randomly assigned to haloperidol and olanzapine treatment underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 3, 6, and 12 months. The caudate and hippocampus were represented as medial representations (M-reps); mesh structures derived from automatic segmentations of high resolution MRIs. Two quantitative shape measures were examined: local width and local deformation. A novel nonparametric statistical method, adjusted exponentially tilted (ET) likelihood, was used to compare the shape measures across the three groups while controlling for covariates. Longitudinal shape change was not observed in the hippocampus or caudate when the treatment groups and controls were examined in a global analysis, nor when the three groups were examined individually. Both baseline and repeated measures analysis showed differences in local caudate and hippocampal size between patients and controls, while no consistent differences were shown between treatment groups. Regionally specific differences in local hippocampal and caudate shape are present in schizophrenic patients. Treatment-related related longitudinal shape change was not observed within the studied timeframe. Our results provide additional evidence for disrupted cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuits in schizophrenia. CLINICAL TRIAL INFORMATION: This longitudinal study was conducted from March 1, 1997 to July 31, 2001 at 14 academic medical centers (11 in the United States, one in Canada, one in the Netherlands, and one in England). This study was performed prior to the establishment of centralized registries of federally and privately supported clinical trials.



B. Paniagua, O. Emodi, J. Hill, J. Fishbaugh, L.A. Pimenta, S.R. Aylward, E. Andinet, G. Gerig, J. Gilmore, J.A. van Aalst, M. Styner. “3D of brain shape and volume after cranial vault remodeling surgery for craniosynostosis correction in infants,” In Proceedings of SPIE 8672, Medical Imaging 2013: Biomedical Applications in Molecular, Structural, and Functional Imaging, 86720V, 2013.
DOI: 10.1117/12.2006524

ABSTRACT

The skull of young children is made up of bony plates that enable growth. Craniosynostosis is a birth defect that causes one or more sutures on an infant’s skull to close prematurely. Corrective surgery focuses on cranial and orbital rim shaping to return the skull to a more normal shape. Functional problems caused by craniosynostosis such as speech and motor delay can improve after surgical correction, but a post-surgical analysis of brain development in comparison with age-matched healthy controls is necessary to assess surgical outcome. Full brain segmentations obtained from pre- and post-operative computed tomography (CT) scans of 8 patients with single suture sagittal (n=5) and metopic (n=3), nonsyndromic craniosynostosis from 41 to 452 days-of-age were included in this study. Age-matched controls obtained via 4D acceleration-based regression of a cohort of 402 full brain segmentations from healthy controls magnetic resonance images (MRI) were also used for comparison (ages 38 to 825 days). 3D point-based models of patient and control cohorts were obtained using SPHARM-PDM shape analysis tool. From a full dataset of regressed shapes, 240 healthy regressed shapes between 30 and 588 days-of-age (time step = 2.34 days) were selected. Volumes and shape metrics were obtained for craniosynostosis and healthy age-matched subjects. Volumes and shape metrics in single suture craniosynostosis patients were larger than age-matched controls for pre- and post-surgery. The use of 3D shape and volumetric measurements show that brain growth is not normal in patients with single suture craniosynostosis.



N. Sadeghi, M.W. Prastawa, P.T. Fletcher, C. Vachet, Bo Wang, J.H. Gilmore, G. Gerig. “Multivariate Modeling of Longitudinal MRI in Early Brain Development with Confidence Measures,” In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), pp. 1400--1403. 2013.
DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2013.6556795

ABSTRACT

The human brain undergoes rapid organization and structuring early in life. Longitudinal imaging enables the study of these changes over a developmental period within individuals through estimation of population growth trajectory and its variability. In this paper, we focus on maturation of white and gray matter as is depicted in structural and diffusion MRI of healthy subjects with repeated scans. We provide a framework for joint analysis of both structural MRI and DTI (Diffusion Tensor Imaging) using multivariate nonlinear mixed effect modeling of temporal changes. Our framework constructs normative growth models for all the modalities that take into account the correlation among the modalities and individuals, along with estimation of the variability of the population trends. We apply our method to study early brain development, and to our knowledge this is the first multimodel longitudinal modeling of diffusion and signal intensity changes for this growth stage. Results show the potential of our framework to study growth trajectories, as well as neurodevelopmental disorders through comparison against the constructed normative models of multimodal 4D MRI.



N. Sadeghi, M.W. Prastawa, P.T. Fletcher, J. Wolff, J.H. Gilmore, G. Gerig. “Regional characterization of longitudinal DT-MRI to study white matter maturation of the early developing brain,” In NeuroImage, Vol. 68, pp. 236--247. March, 2013.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.11.040
PubMed ID: 23235270

ABSTRACT

The human brain undergoes rapid and dynamic development early in life. Assessment of brain growth patterns relevant to neurological disorders and disease requires a normative population model of growth and variability in order to evaluate deviation from typical development. In this paper, we focus on maturation of brain white matter as shown in diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI), measured by fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), as well as axial and radial diffusivities (AD, RD). We present a novel methodology to model temporal changes of white matter diffusion from longitudinal DT-MRI data taken at discrete time points. Our proposed framework combines nonlinear modeling of trajectories of individual subjects, population analysis, and testing for regional differences in growth pattern. We first perform deformable mapping of longitudinal DT-MRI of healthy infants imaged at birth, 1 year, and 2 years of age, into a common unbiased atlas. An existing template of labeled white matter regions is registered to this atlas to define anatomical regions of interest. Diffusivity properties of these regions, presented over time, serve as input to the longitudinal characterization of changes. We use non-linear mixed effect (NLME) modeling where temporal change is described by the Gompertz function. The Gompertz growth function uses intuitive parameters related to delay, rate of change, and expected asymptotic value; all descriptive measures which can answer clinical questions related to quantitative analysis of growth patterns. Results suggest that our proposed framework provides descriptive and quantitative information on growth trajectories that can be interpreted by clinicians using natural language terms that describe growth. Statistical analysis of regional differences between anatomical regions which are known to mature differently demonstrates the potential of the proposed method for quantitative assessment of brain growth and differences thereof. This will eventually lead to a prediction of white matter diffusion properties and associated cognitive development at later stages given imaging data at early stages.



N. Sadeghi, C. Vachet, M. Prastawa, J. Korenberg, G. Gerig. “Analysis of Diffusion Tensor Imaging for Subjects with Down Syndrome,” In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping OHBM, pp. (in print). 2013.

ABSTRACT

Down syndrome (DS) is the most common chromosome abnormality in humans. It is typically associated with delayed cognitive development and physical growth. DS is also associated with Alzheimer-like dementia [1]. In this study we analyze the white matter integrity of individuals with DS compared to control as is reflected in the diffusion parameters derived from Diffusion Tensor Imaging. DTI provides relevant information about the underlying tissue, which correlates with cognitive function [2]. We present a cross-sectional analysis of white matter tracts of subjects with DS compared to control.



A. Sharma, P.T. Fletcher, J.H. Gilmore, M.L. Escolar, A. Gupta, M. Styner, G. Gerig. “Spatiotemporal Modeling of Discrete-Time Distribution-Valued Data Applied to DTI Tract Evolution in Infant Neurodevelopment,” In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), pp. 684--687. 2013.
DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2013.6556567

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a novel method that extends spatiotemporal growth modeling to distribution-valued data. The method relaxes assumptions on the underlying noise models by considering the data to be represented by the complete probability distributions rather than a representative, single-valued summary statistics like the mean. When summarizing by the latter method, information on the underlying variability of data is lost early in the process and is not available at later stages of statistical analysis. The concept of ’distance’ between distributions and an ’average’ of distributions is employed. The framework quantifies growth trajectories for individuals and populations in terms of the complete data variability estimated along time and space. Concept is demonstrated in the context of our driving application which is modeling of age-related changes along white matter tracts in early neurodevelopment. Results are shown for a single subject with Krabbe's disease in comparison with a normative trend estimated from 15 healthy controls.



S. Short, J.T. Elison, B.D. Goldman, M. Styner, H. Gu, M. Connelly, E. Maltbie, S. Woolson, W. Lin, G. Gerig, J.S. Reznick, J.H. Gilmore. “Associations Between White Matter Microstructure and Infants' Working Memory,” In Neuroimage, Vol. 64, No. 1, Elsvier, pp. 156--166. January, 2013.
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.09.021
PubMed ID: 22989623

ABSTRACT

Working memory emerges in infancy and plays a privileged role in subsequent adaptive cognitive development. The neural networks important for the development of working memory during infancy remain unknown. We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and deterministic fiber tracking to characterize the microstructure of white matter fiber bundles hypothesized to support working memory in 12-month-old infants (n=73). Here we show robust associations between infants' visuospatial working memory performance and microstructural characteristics of widespread white matter. Significant associations were found for white matter tracts that connect brain regions known to support working memory in older children and adults (genu, anterior and superior thalamic radiations, anterior cingulum, arcuate fasciculus, and the temporal-parietal segment). Better working memory scores were associated with higher FA and lower RD values in these selected white matter tracts. These tract-specific brain-behavior relationships accounted for a significant amount of individual variation above and beyond infants' gestational age and developmental level, as measured with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning. Working memory was not associated with global measures of brain volume, as expected, and few associations were found between working memory and control white matter tracts. To our knowledge, this study is among the first demonstrations of brain-behavior associations in infants using quantitative tractography. The ability to characterize subtle individual differences in infant brain development associated with complex cognitive functions holds promise for improving our understanding of normative development, biomarkers of risk, experience-dependent learning and neuro-cognitive periods of developmental plasticity.



A. Vardhan, M.W. Prastawa, J. Piven, G. Gerig. “Modeling Longitudinal MRI Changes in Populations Using a Localized, Information-Theoretic Measure of Contrast,” In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), pp. 1396--1399. 2013.
DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2013.6556794

ABSTRACT

Longitudinal MR imaging during early brain development provides important information about growth patterns and the development of neurological disorders. We propose a new framework for studying brain growth patterns within and across populations based on MRI contrast changes, measured at each time point of interest and at each voxel. Our method uses regression in the LogOdds space and an informationtheoretic measure of distance between distributions to capture contrast in a manner that is robust to imaging parameters and without requiring intensity normalization. We apply our method to a clinical neuroimaging study on early brain development in autism, where we obtain a 4D spatiotemporal model of contrast changes in multimodal structural MRI.



A. Vardhan, J. Piven, M. Prastawa, G. Gerig. “A longitudinal structural MRI study of change in regional contrast in Autism Spectrum Disorder,” In Proceedings of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping OHBM, pp. (in print). 2013.

ABSTRACT

The brain undergoes tremendous changes in shape, size, structure, and chemical composition, between birth and 2 years of age [Rutherford, 2001]. Existing studies have focused on morphometric and volumetric changes to study the early developing brain. Although there have been some recent appearance studies based on intensity changes [Serag et al., 2011], these are highly dependent on the quality of normalization. The study we present here uses the changes in contrast between gray and white matter tissue intensities in structural MRI of the brain, as a measure of regional growth [Vardhan et al., 2011]. Kernel regression was used to generate continuous curves characterizing the changes in contrast with time. A statistical analysis was then performed on these curves, comparing two population groups : (i) HR+ : high-risk subjects who tested positive for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and (ii) HR- : high-risk subjects who tested negative for ASD.



A.R. Verde, J.-B. Berger, A. Gupta, M. Farzinfar, A. Kaiser, V.W. Chanon, C. Boettiger, H. Johnson, J. Matsui, A. Sharma, C. Goodlett, Y. Shi, H. Zhu, G. Gerig, S. Gouttard, C. Vachet, M. Styner. “UNC-Utah NA-MIC DTI framework: atlas based fiber tract analysis with application to a study of nicotine smoking addiction,” In Proc. SPIE 8669, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing, 86692D, Vol. 8669, pp. 86692D-86692D-8. 2013.
DOI: 10.1117/12.2007093

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The UNC-Utah NA-MIC DTI framework represents a coherent, open source, atlas fiber tract based DTI analysis framework that addresses the lack of a standardized fiber tract based DTI analysis workflow in the field. Most steps utilize graphical user interfaces (GUI) to simplify interaction and provide an extensive DTI analysis framework for non-technical researchers/investigators. Data: We illustrate the use of our framework on a 54 directional DWI neuroimaging study contrasting 15 Smokers and 14 Controls. Method(s): At the heart of the framework is a set of tools anchored around the multi-purpose image analysis platform 3D-Slicer. Several workflow steps are handled via external modules called from Slicer in order to provide an integrated approach. Our workflow starts with conversion from DICOM, followed by thorough automatic and interactive quality control (QC), which is a must for a good DTI study. Our framework is centered around a DTI atlas that is either provided as a template or computed directly as an unbiased average atlas from the study data via deformable atlas building. Fiber tracts are defined via interactive tractography and clustering on that atlas. DTI fiber profiles are extracted automatically using the atlas mapping information. These tract parameter profiles are then analyzed using our statistics toolbox (FADTTS). The statistical results are then mapped back on to the fiber bundles and visualized with 3D Slicer. Results: This framework provides a coherent set of tools for DTI quality control and analysis. Conclusions: This framework will provide the field with a uniform process for DTI quality control and analysis.



Bo Wang, M.W. Prastawa, A. Irimia, M.C. Chambers, N. Sadeghi, P.M. Vespa, J.D. van Horn, G. Gerig. “Analyzing Imaging Biomarkers for Traumatic Brain Injury Using 4D Modeling of Longitudinal MRI,” In 2013 IEEE Proceedings of 10th International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), pp. 1392 - 1395. 2013.
DOI: 10.1109/ISBI.2013.6556793

ABSTRACT

Quantitative imaging biomarkers are important for assessment of impact, recovery and treatment efficacy in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). To our knowledge, the identification of such biomarkers characterizing disease progress and recovery has been insufficiently explored in TBI due to difficulties in registration of baseline and followup data and automatic segmentation of tissue and lesions from multimodal, longitudinal MR image data. We propose a new methodology for computing imaging biomarkers in TBI by extending a recently proposed spatiotemporal 4D modeling approach in order to compute quantitative features of tissue change. The proposed method computes surface-based and voxel-based measurements such as cortical thickness, volume changes, and geometric deformation. We analyze the potential for clinical use of these biomarkers by correlating them with TBI-specific patient scores at the level of the whole brain and of individual regions. Our preliminary results indicate that the proposed voxel-based biomarkers are correlated with clinical outcomes.



Bo Wang, M. Prastawa, A. Saha, S.P. Awate, A. Irimia, M.C. Chambers, P.M. Vespa, J.D. Van Horn, V. Pascucci, G. Gerig. “Modeling 4D changes in pathological anatomy using domain adaptation: analysis of TBI imaging using a tumor database,” In Proceedings of the 2013 MICCAI-MBIA Workshop, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Vol. 8159, Note: Awarded Best Paper!, pp. 31--39. 2013.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-02126-3_4

ABSTRACT

Analysis of 4D medical images presenting pathology (i.e., lesions) is signi cantly challenging due to the presence of complex changes over time. Image analysis methods for 4D images with lesions need to account for changes in brain structures due to deformation, as well as the formation and deletion of new structures (e.g., edema, bleeding) due to the physiological processes associated with damage, intervention, and recovery. We propose a novel framework that models 4D changes in pathological anatomy across time, and provides explicit mapping from a healthy template to subjects with pathology. Moreover, our framework uses transfer learning to leverage rich information from a known source domain, where we have a collection of completely segmented images, to yield effective appearance models for the input target domain. The automatic 4D segmentation method uses a novel domain adaptation technique for generative kernel density models to transfer information between different domains, resulting in a fully automatic method that requires no user interaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel approach with the analysis of 4D images of traumatic brain injury (TBI), using a synthetic tumor database as the source domain.


2012


C. Cascio, M.J. Gribbin, S. Gouttard, R.G. Smith, M. Jomier, S.H. Field, M. Graves, H.C. Hazlett, K. Muller, G. Gerig, J. Piven. “Fractional Anisotropy Distributions in 2-6 Year-Old Children with Autism,” In Journal of Intellectual Disability Research (JIDR), pp. (in print). 2012.

ABSTRACT

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that autism is a disorder of distributed neural networks that may exhibit abnormal developmental trajectories. Characterization of white matter early in the developmental course of the disorder is critical to understanding these aberrant trajectories.

Methods: A cross-sectional study of 2-6 year old children with autism was conducted using diffusion tensor imaging combined with a novel statistical approach employing fractional anisotropy distributions. 58 children aged 18-79 months were imaged: 33 were diagnosed with autism, 8 with general developmental delay (DD), and 17 were typically developing (TD). Fractional anisotropy values within global white matter, cortical lobes, and the cerebellum were measured and transformed to random F distributions for each subject. Each distribution of values for a region was summarized by estimating delta, the estimated mean and standard deviation of the approximating F for each distribution.

Results: The estimated delta parameter, delta-hat, was significantly decreased in individuals with autism compared to the combined control group. This was true in all cortical lobes, as well as in the cerebellum, but differences were strongest in the temporal lobe. Predicted developmental trajectories of delta-hat across the age range in the sample showed patterns that partially distinguished the groups. Exploratory analyses suggested that the variability, rather than the central tendency, component of delta-hat was the driving force behind these results. Conclusions: White matter in young children with autism appears to be abnormally homogeneous, which may reflect poorly organized or differentiated pathways, particularly in the temporal lobe, which is important for social and emotional cognition.



M. Datar, P. Muralidharan, A. Kumar, S. Gouttard, J. Piven, G. Gerig, R.T. Whitaker, P.T. Fletcher. “Mixed-Effects Shape Models for Estimating Longitudinal Changes in Anatomy,” In Spatio-temporal Image Analysis for Longitudinal and Time-Series Image Data, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7570, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, pp. 76--87. 2012.
ISBN: 978-3-642-33554-9
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-33555-6_7

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a new method for longitudinal shape analysis that ts a linear mixed-e ects model, while simultaneously optimizing correspondences on a set of anatomical shapes. Shape changes are modeled in a hierarchical fashion, with the global population trend as a xed e ect and individual trends as random e ects. The statistical signi cance of the estimated trends are evaluated using speci cally designed permutation tests. We also develop a permutation test based on the Hotelling T2 statistic to compare the average shapes trends between two populations. We demonstrate the bene ts of our method on a synthetic example of longitudinal tori and data from a developmental neuroimaging study.

Keywords: Computer Science



M.K. Dougherty, H. Gu, J. Bizzell, S. Ramsey, G. Gerig, D.O. Perkins, A. Belger. “Differences in subcortical structures in young adolescents at familial risk for schizophrenia: A preliminary study,” In Psychiatry Res., pp. (Epub ahead of print. Nov. 9, 2012.
DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2012.04.016
PubMed ID: 23146250