IC‐P‐024: Localization of hippocampal atrophy in Alzheimer's disease

The hippocampus presents the highest rate of atrophy in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD), with more pronounced neuron loss reported in CA1 and subiculum. The aim of this study is to increase the discrimination power of hippocampal shape analysis between AD and normal controls (NC) by focusing on the subregions with atrophy associated with AD and describing the localized shape changes using statistical shape models (SSMs).

Atlas selection strategy using least angle regression in multi-atlas segmentation propagation

International audience; In multi-atlas based segmentation propagation, segmentations from multiple atlases are propagated to the target image and combined to produce the segmentation result. Local weighted voting (LWV) method is a classifier fusion method which combines the propagated atlases weighted by local image similarity. We demonstrate that the segmentation accuracy using LWV improves as the number of atlases increases. Under this context, we show that introducing diversity in addition to image similarity by using least-angle regression (LAR) criteria is a more efficient way to rank and select atlases. The accuracy of multi-atlas segmentation converges faster when the atlases are sel…

Detecting global and local hippocampal shape changes in Alzheimer's disease using statistical shape models.

Item does not contain fulltext The hippocampus is affected at an early stage in the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). With the use of structural magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, we can investigate the effect of AD on the morphology of the hippocampus. The hippocampal shape variations among a population can be usually described using statistical shape models (SSMs). Conventional SSMs model the modes of variations among the population via principal component analysis (PCA). Although these modes are representative of variations within the training data, they are not necessarily discriminative on labeled data or relevant to the differences between the subpopulations. We use the shape des…

LOCALIZATION OF HIPPOCAMPAL ATROPHY IN ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

International audience; The hippocampus presents the highest rate of atrophy in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD), with more pronounced neuron loss reported in CA1 and subiculum. The aim of this study is to increase the discrimination power of hippocampal shape analysis between AD and normal controls (NC) by focusing on the subregions with atrophy associated with AD and describing the localized shape changes using statistical shape models (SSMs).

Reproducibility of multiphase pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling and the effect of post-processing analysis methods

Arterial spin labeling (ASL) is an emerging MRI technique for non-invasive measurement of cerebral blood flow (CBF). Compared to invasive perfusion imaging modalities, ASL suffers from low sensitivity due to poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), susceptibility to motion artifacts and low spatial resolution, all of which limit its reliability. In this work, the effects of various state of the art image processing techniques for addressing these ASL limitations are investigated. A processing pipeline consisting of motion correction, ASL motion correction imprecision removal, temporal and spatial filtering, partial volume effect correction, and CBF quantification was developed and assessed. To fur…

Increasing power to predict mild cognitive impairment conversion to Alzheimer's disease using hippocampal atrophy rate and statistical shape models

Identifying mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects who will convert to clinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important for therapeutic decisions, patient counselling and clinical trials. Hippocampal volume and rate of atrophy predict clinical decline at the MCI stage and progression to AD. In this paper, we create p-maps from the differences in the shape of the hippocampus between 60 normal controls and 60 AD subjects using statistical shape models, and generate different regions of interest (ROI) by thresholding the p-maps at different significance levels. We demonstrate increased statistical power to classify 86 MCI converters and 128 MCI stable subjects using the hippocampal atrophy rat…

EFFICIENT MACHINE LEARNING FRAMEWORK FOR COMPUTER-AIDED DETECTION OF CEREBRAL MICROBLEEDS USING THE RADON TRANSFORM

International audience; Recent developments of susceptibility weighted MR techniques have improved visualization of venous vasculature and underlying pathologies such as cerebral microbleed (CMB). CMBs are small round hypointense lesions on MRI images that are emerging as a potential biomarker for cerebrovascular disease. CMB manual rating has limited reliability, is time-consuming and is prone to errors as small CMBs can be easily missed or mistaken for venous crosssections. This paper presents a computer-aided detection technique that utilizes a novel cascade of random forest classifiers which are trained on robust Radon-based features with an unbalanced sample distribution. The training …

Computer-aided detection of cerebral microbleeds in susceptibility-weighted imaging.

Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) is recognized as the preferred MRI technique for visualizing cerebral vasculature and related pathologies such as cerebral microbleeds (CMBs). Manual identification of CMBs is time-consuming, has limited reliability and reproducibility, and is prone to misinterpretation. In this paper, a novel computer-aided microbleed detection technique based on machine learning is presented: First, spherical-like objects (potential CMB candidates) with their corresponding bounding boxes were detected using a novel multi-scale Laplacian of Gaussian technique. A set of robust 3-dimensional Radon- and Hessian-based shape descriptors within each bounding box were then ex…

P4‐266: Decreases in cerebral blood flow are associated with Aβ status in preclinical Alzheimer's disease

AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF SMALL SPHERICAL LESIONS USING MULTISCALE APPROACH IN 3D MEDICAL IMAGES

International audience; Automated detection of small, low level shapes such as circular/spherical objects in images is a challenging computer vision problem. For many applications, especially microbleed detection in Alzheimer's disease, an automatic pre-screening scheme is required to identify potential seeds with high sensitivity and reasonable specificity. A new method is proposed to detect spherical objects in 3D medical images within the multi-scale Laplacian of Gaussian framework. The major contributions are (1) breaking down 3D sphere detection into 1D line profile detection along each coordinate dimension, (2) identifying center of structures by normalizing the line response profile …