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Li Y, Zhang W, Wu Y, Yin L, Zhu C, Chen Y, Cetin-Karayumak S, Cho KIK, Zekelman LR, Rushmore J, Rathi Y, Makris N, O'Donnell LJ, Zhang F. A diffusion MRI tractography atlas for concurrent white matter mapping across Eastern and Western populations. Sci Data 2024; 11:787. [PMID: 39019877 PMCID: PMC11255335 DOI: 10.1038/s41597-024-03624-2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/09/2024] [Accepted: 07/08/2024] [Indexed: 07/19/2024] Open
Abstract
The study of brain differences across Eastern and Western populations provides vital insights for understanding potential cultural and genetic influences on cognition and mental health. Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is an important tool in assessing white matter (WM) connectivity and brain tissue microstructure across different populations. However, a comprehensive investigation into WM fiber tracts between Eastern and Western populations is challenged due to the lack of a cross-population WM atlas and the large site-specific variability of dMRI data. This study presents a dMRI tractography atlas, namely the East-West WM Atlas, for concurrent WM mapping between Eastern and Western populations and creates a large, harmonized dMRI dataset (n=306) based on the Human Connectome Project and the Chinese Human Connectome Project. The curated WM atlas, as well as subject-specific data including the harmonized dMRI data, the whole brain tractography data, and parcellated WM fiber tracts and their diffusion measures, are publicly released. This resource is a valuable addition to facilitating the exploration of brain commonalities and differences across diverse cultural backgrounds.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yijie Li
- School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Wei Zhang
- School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Ye Wu
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China
| | - Li Yin
- West China Hospital of Medical Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
| | - Ce Zhu
- School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Yuqian Chen
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
| | | | - Kang Ik K Cho
- Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
| | - Leo R Zekelman
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
| | - Jarrett Rushmore
- Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
- Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, USA
| | - Yogesh Rathi
- Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
| | - Nikos Makris
- Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
| | - Lauren J O'Donnell
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
| | - Fan Zhang
- School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
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2
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Zhang D, Zong F, Zhang Q, Yue Y, Zhang F, Zhao K, Wang D, Wang P, Zhang X, Liu Y. Anat-SFSeg: Anatomically-guided superficial fiber segmentation with point-cloud deep learning. Med Image Anal 2024; 95:103165. [PMID: 38608510 DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2024.103165] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/29/2023] [Revised: 03/28/2024] [Accepted: 04/05/2024] [Indexed: 04/14/2024]
Abstract
Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) tractography is a critical technique to map the brain's structural connectivity. Accurate segmentation of white matter, particularly the superficial white matter (SWM), is essential for neuroscience and clinical research. However, it is challenging to segment SWM due to the short adjacent gyri connection in a U-shaped pattern. In this work, we propose an Anatomically-guided Superficial Fiber Segmentation (Anat-SFSeg) framework to improve the performance on SWM segmentation. The framework consists of a unique fiber anatomical descriptor (named FiberAnatMap) and a deep learning network based on point-cloud data. The spatial coordinates of fibers represented as point clouds, as well as the anatomical features at both the individual and group levels, are fed into a neural network. The network is trained on Human Connectome Project (HCP) datasets and tested on the subjects with a range of cognitive impairment levels. One new metric named fiber anatomical region proportion (FARP), quantifies the ratio of fibers in the defined brain regions and enables the comparison with other methods. Another metric named anatomical region fiber count (ARFC), represents the average fiber number in each cluster for the assessment of inter-subject differences. The experimental results demonstrate that Anat-SFSeg achieves the highest accuracy on HCP datasets and exhibits great generalization on clinical datasets. Diffusion tensor metrics and ARFC show disorder severity associated alterations in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairments (MCI). Correlations with cognitive grades show that these metrics are potential neuroimaging biomarkers for AD. Furthermore, Anat-SFSeg could be utilized to explore other neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorders.
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Affiliation(s)
- Di Zhang
- School of Airtificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
| | - Fangrong Zong
- School of Airtificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China.
| | - Qichen Zhang
- School of Airtificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
| | - Yunhui Yue
- School of Airtificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
| | - Fan Zhang
- School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Kun Zhao
- School of Airtificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
| | - Dawei Wang
- Department of Radiology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University, Jinan, China; Department of Epidemiology and Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Shandong University, Jinan, China; Institute of Brain and Brain-Inspired Science, Shandong University, Jinan, China
| | - Pan Wang
- Department of Neurology, Tianjin Huanhu Hospital, Tianjin, China
| | - Xi Zhang
- Department of Neurology, the Second Medical Centre, National Clinical Research Centre for Geriatric Diseases, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China
| | - Yong Liu
- School of Airtificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
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3
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Xue T, Zhang F, Zekelman LR, Zhang C, Chen Y, Cetin-Karayumak S, Pieper S, Wells WM, Rathi Y, Makris N, Cai W, O'Donnell LJ. TractoSCR: a novel supervised contrastive regression framework for prediction of neurocognitive measures using multi-site harmonized diffusion MRI tractography. Front Neurosci 2024; 18:1411797. [PMID: 38988766 PMCID: PMC11233814 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1411797] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/03/2024] [Accepted: 06/10/2024] [Indexed: 07/12/2024] Open
Abstract
Neuroimaging-based prediction of neurocognitive measures is valuable for studying how the brain's structure relates to cognitive function. However, the accuracy of prediction using popular linear regression models is relatively low. We propose a novel deep regression method, namely TractoSCR, that allows full supervision for contrastive learning in regression tasks using diffusion MRI tractography. TractoSCR performs supervised contrastive learning by using the absolute difference between continuous regression labels (i.e., neurocognitive scores) to determine positive and negative pairs. We apply TractoSCR to analyze a large-scale dataset including multi-site harmonized diffusion MRI and neurocognitive data from 8,735 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. We extract white matter microstructural measures using a fine parcellation of white matter tractography into fiber clusters. Using these measures, we predict three scores related to domains of higher-order cognition (general cognitive ability, executive function, and learning/memory). To identify important fiber clusters for prediction of these neurocognitive scores, we propose a permutation feature importance method for high-dimensional data. We find that TractoSCR obtains significantly higher accuracy of neurocognitive score prediction compared to other state-of-the-art methods. We find that the most predictive fiber clusters are predominantly located within the superficial white matter and projection tracts, particularly the superficial frontal white matter and striato-frontal connections. Overall, our results demonstrate the utility of contrastive representation learning methods for regression, and in particular for improving neuroimaging-based prediction of higher-order cognitive abilities. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/SlicerDMRI/TractoSCR.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tengfei Xue
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
- School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Fan Zhang
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
- School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
| | - Leo R. Zekelman
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | - Chaoyi Zhang
- School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Yuqian Chen
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | | | - Steve Pieper
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | - William M. Wells
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | - Yogesh Rathi
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | - Nikos Makris
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
| | - Weidong Cai
- School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Lauren J. O'Donnell
- Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
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4
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Chen Y, Zekelman LR, Zhang C, Xue T, Song Y, Makris N, Rathi Y, Golby AJ, Cai W, Zhang F, O'Donnell LJ. TractGeoNet: A geometric deep learning framework for pointwise analysis of tract microstructure to predict language assessment performance. Med Image Anal 2024; 94:103120. [PMID: 38458095 PMCID: PMC11016451 DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2024.103120] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/09/2023] [Revised: 11/30/2023] [Accepted: 02/21/2024] [Indexed: 03/10/2024]
Abstract
We propose a geometric deep-learning-based framework, TractGeoNet, for performing regression using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) tractography and associated pointwise tissue microstructure measurements. By employing a point cloud representation, TractGeoNet can directly utilize tissue microstructure and positional information from all points within a fiber tract without the need to average or bin data along the streamline as traditionally required by dMRI tractometry methods. To improve regression performance, we propose a novel loss function, the Paired-Siamese Regression loss, which encourages the model to focus on accurately predicting the relative differences between regression label scores rather than just their absolute values. In addition, to gain insight into the brain regions that contribute most strongly to the prediction results, we propose a Critical Region Localization algorithm. This algorithm identifies highly predictive anatomical regions within the white matter fiber tracts for the regression task. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method by predicting individual performance on two neuropsychological assessments of language using a dataset of 20 association white matter fiber tracts from 806 subjects from the Human Connectome Project Young Adult dataset. The results demonstrate superior prediction performance of TractGeoNet compared to several popular regression models that have been applied to predict individual cognitive performance based on neuroimaging features. Of the twenty tracts studied, we find that the left arcuate fasciculus tract is the most highly predictive of the two studied language performance assessments. Within each tract, we localize critical regions whose microstructure and point information are highly and consistently predictive of language performance across different subjects and across multiple independently trained models. These critical regions are widespread and distributed across both hemispheres and all cerebral lobes, including areas of the brain considered important for language function such as superior and anterior temporal regions, pars opercularis, and precentral gyrus. Overall, TractGeoNet demonstrates the potential of geometric deep learning to enhance the study of the brain's white matter fiber tracts and to relate their structure to human traits such as language performance.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuqian Chen
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Leo R Zekelman
- Department of Neurosurgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Chaoyi Zhang
- School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Tengfei Xue
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Yang Song
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Nikos Makris
- Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Yogesh Rathi
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Alexandra J Golby
- Department of Neurosurgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| | - Weidong Cai
- School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Fan Zhang
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
| | - Lauren J O'Donnell
- Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
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Dritsas S, Chua KWD, Goh ZH, Simpson RE. Classification, registration and segmentation of ear canal impressions using convolutional neural networks. Med Image Anal 2024; 94:103152. [PMID: 38531210 DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2024.103152] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/15/2023] [Revised: 12/12/2023] [Accepted: 03/20/2024] [Indexed: 03/28/2024]
Abstract
Today, fitting bespoke hearing aids involves injecting silicone into patients' ears to produce ear canal molds. These are subsequently 3D scanned to create digital ear canal impressions. However, before digital impressions can be used they require a substantial amount of effort in manual 3D editing. In this article, we present computational methods to pre-process ear canal impressions. The aim is to create automation tools to assist the hearing aid design, manufacturing and fitting processes as well as normalizing anatomical data to assist the study of the outer ear canal's morphology. The methods include classifying the handedness of the impression into left and right ear types, orienting the geometries onto the same coordinate system sense, and removing extraneous artifacts introduced by the silicone mold. We investigate the use of convolutional neural networks for performing these semantic tasks and evaluate their accuracy using a dataset of 3000 ear canal impressions. The neural networks proved highly effective at performing these tasks with 95.8% adjusted accuracy in classification, 92.3% within 20° angular error in registration and 93.4% intersection over union in segmentation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stylianos Dritsas
- Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, 487372, Singapore.
| | | | - Zhi Hwee Goh
- Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, 487372, Singapore
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6
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Mendoza C, Román C, Mangin JF, Hernández C, Guevara P. Short fiber bundle filtering and test-retest reproducibility of the Superficial White Matter. Front Neurosci 2024; 18:1394681. [PMID: 38737100 PMCID: PMC11088237 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1394681] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2024] [Accepted: 04/08/2024] [Indexed: 05/14/2024] Open
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in studying the Superficial White Matter (SWM). The SWM consists of short association fibers connecting near giry of the cortex, with a complex organization due to their close relationship with the cortical folding patterns. Therefore, their segmentation from dMRI tractography datasets requires dedicated methodologies to identify the main fiber bundle shape and deal with spurious fibers. This paper presents an enhanced short fiber bundle segmentation based on a SWM bundle atlas and the filtering of noisy fibers. The method was tuned and evaluated over HCP test-retest probabilistic tractography datasets (44 subjects). We propose four fiber bundle filters to remove spurious fibers. Furthermore, we include the identification of the main fiber fascicle to obtain well-defined fiber bundles. First, we identified four main bundle shapes in the SWM atlas, and performed a filter tuning in a subset of 28 subjects. The filter based on the Convex Hull provided the highest similarity between corresponding test-retest fiber bundles. Subsequently, we applied the best filter in the 16 remaining subjects for all atlas bundles, showing that filtered fiber bundles significantly improve test-retest reproducibility indices when removing between ten and twenty percent of the fibers. Additionally, we applied the bundle segmentation with and without filtering to the ABIDE-II database. The fiber bundle filtering allowed us to obtain a higher number of bundles with significant differences in fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, and radial diffusivity of Autism Spectrum Disorder patients relative to controls.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cristóbal Mendoza
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile
| | - Claudio Román
- Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Ingeniería en Salud, Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile
| | | | - Cecilia Hernández
- Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile
- Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering (CeBiB), Santiago, Chile
| | - Pamela Guevara
- Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile
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7
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Zhang Q, Wang H, Shi Y, Li W. White matter biomarker for predicting de novo Parkinson's disease using tract-based spatial statistics: a machine learning-based model. Quant Imaging Med Surg 2024; 14:3086-3106. [PMID: 38617147 PMCID: PMC11007501 DOI: 10.21037/qims-23-1478] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/23/2023] [Accepted: 03/07/2024] [Indexed: 04/16/2024]
Abstract
Background Parkinson's disease (PD) is an irreversible, chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system, potentially associated with cerebral white matter (WM) lesions. Investigating the microstructural alterations within the WM in the early stages of PD can help to identify the disease early and enable intervention to reduce the associated serious threats to health. Methods This study selected 227 cases from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) database, including 152 de novo PD patients and 75 normal controls (NC). Whole-brain voxel analysis of the WM was performed using the tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) method. The WM regions with statistically significant differences (P<0.05) between the PD and NC groups were identified and used as masks. The mask was applied to each case's fractional anisotropy (FA) image to extract voxel values as feature vectors. Geometric dimensionality reduction was then applied to eliminate redundant values in the feature vectors. Subsequently, the cases were randomly divided into a training group (158 cases, including 103 PD patients and 55 NC) and a test group (69 cases, including 49 PD patients and 20 NC). The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression algorithm was employed to extract the minimal set of relevant features, then the random forest (RF) algorithm was utilized for classification using 5-fold cross validation. The resulting model was further integrated with clinical factors to create a comprehensive prediction model. Results In comparison to the NC group, the FA values in PD patients exhibited a statistically significant decrease (P<0.05), indicating the presence of widespread WM lesions across multiple brain regions. Moreover, the PD prediction model, constructed based on these WM lesion regions, yielded prediction accuracy (ACC) and area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) values of 0.778 and 0.865 in the validation set, and 0.783 and 0.831 in the test set, respectively. Furthermore, the performance of the integrated model showed some improvement, with ACC and AUC values in the test set reaching 0.804 and 0.844, respectively. Conclusions The quantitative calculation of WM lesion area on FA images using the TBSS method can serve as a neuroimaging biomarker for diagnosing and predicting early PD at the individual level. When integrated with clinical variables, the predictive performance improves.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qi Zhang
- Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
- Shanghai Key Laboratory of Medical Imaging Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, Shanghai, China
| | - Haoran Wang
- Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
- Shanghai Key Laboratory of Medical Imaging Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, Shanghai, China
| | - Yonghong Shi
- Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
- Shanghai Key Laboratory of Medical Imaging Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, Shanghai, China
| | - Wensheng Li
- Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
- Shanghai Key Laboratory of Medical Imaging Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, Shanghai, China
- Department of Human Anatomy and Histoembryology, School of Basic Medical Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
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8
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Joshi A, Li H, Parikh NA, He L. A systematic review of automated methods to perform white matter tract segmentation. Front Neurosci 2024; 18:1376570. [PMID: 38567281 PMCID: PMC10985163 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2024.1376570] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/25/2024] [Accepted: 03/04/2024] [Indexed: 04/04/2024] Open
Abstract
White matter tract segmentation is a pivotal research area that leverages diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) for the identification and mapping of individual white matter tracts and their trajectories. This study aims to provide a comprehensive systematic literature review on automated methods for white matter tract segmentation in brain dMRI scans. Articles on PubMed, ScienceDirect [NeuroImage, NeuroImage (Clinical), Medical Image Analysis], Scopus and IEEEXplore databases and Conference proceedings of Medical Imaging Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) and International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), were searched in the range from January 2013 until September 2023. This systematic search and review identified 619 articles. Adhering to the specified search criteria using the query, "white matter tract segmentation OR fiber tract identification OR fiber bundle segmentation OR tractography dissection OR white matter parcellation OR tract segmentation," 59 published studies were selected. Among these, 27% employed direct voxel-based methods, 25% applied streamline-based clustering methods, 20% used streamline-based classification methods, 14% implemented atlas-based methods, and 14% utilized hybrid approaches. The paper delves into the research gaps and challenges associated with each of these categories. Additionally, this review paper illuminates the most frequently utilized public datasets for tract segmentation along with their specific characteristics. Furthermore, it presents evaluation strategies and their key attributes. The review concludes with a detailed discussion of the challenges and future directions in this field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ankita Joshi
- Imaging Research Center, Department of Radiology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders Prevention Center, Perinatal Institute, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
| | - Hailong Li
- Imaging Research Center, Department of Radiology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders Prevention Center, Perinatal Institute, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Department of Radiology, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH, United States
| | - Nehal A. Parikh
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders Prevention Center, Perinatal Institute, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH, United States
| | - Lili He
- Imaging Research Center, Department of Radiology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders Prevention Center, Perinatal Institute, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Department of Radiology, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, OH, United States
- Computer Science, Biomedical Informatics, and Biomedical Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, United States
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9
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Li S, Zhang W, Yao S, He J, Zhu C, Gao J, Xue T, Xie G, Chen Y, Torio EF, Feng Y, Bastos DC, Rathi Y, Makris N, Kikinis R, Bi WL, Golby AJ, O'Donnell LJ, Zhang F. Tractography-based automated identification of the retinogeniculate visual pathway with novel microstructure-informed supervised contrastive learning. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2024:2024.01.03.574115. [PMID: 38260369 PMCID: PMC10802389 DOI: 10.1101/2024.01.03.574115] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/24/2024]
Abstract
The retinogeniculate visual pathway (RGVP) is responsible for carrying visual information from the retina to the lateral geniculate nucleus. Identification and visualization of the RGVP are important in studying the anatomy of the visual system and can inform the treatment of related brain diseases. Diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography is an advanced imaging method that uniquely enables in vivo mapping of the 3D trajectory of the RGVP. Currently, identification of the RGVP from tractography data relies on expert (manual) selection of tractography streamlines, which is time-consuming, has high clinical and expert labor costs, and is affected by inter-observer variability. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning framework, DeepRGVP , to enable fast and accurate identification of the RGVP from dMRI tractography data. We design a novel microstructure-informed supervised contrastive learning method that leverages both streamline label and tissue microstructure information to determine positive and negative pairs. We propose a simple and successful streamline-level data augmentation method to address highly imbalanced training data, where the number of RGVP streamlines is much lower than that of non-RGVP streamlines. We perform comparisons with several state-of-the-art deep learning methods that were designed for tractography parcellation, and we show superior RGVP identification results using DeepRGVP. In addition, we demonstrate a good generalizability of DeepRGVP to dMRI tractography data from neurosurgical patients with pituitary tumors and we show DeepRGVP can successfully identify RGVPs despite the effect of lesions affecting the RGVPs. Overall, our study shows the high potential of using deep learning to automatically identify the RGVP.
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10
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Aja-Fernández S, Martín-Martín C, Planchuelo-Gómez Á, Faiyaz A, Uddin MN, Schifitto G, Tiwari A, Shigwan SJ, Kumar Singh R, Zheng T, Cao Z, Wu D, Blumberg SB, Sen S, Goodwin-Allcock T, Slator PJ, Yigit Avci M, Li Z, Bilgic B, Tian Q, Wang X, Tang Z, Cabezas M, Rauland A, Merhof D, Manzano Maria R, Campos VP, Santini T, da Costa Vieira MA, HashemizadehKolowri S, DiBella E, Peng C, Shen Z, Chen Z, Ullah I, Mani M, Abdolmotalleby H, Eckstrom S, Baete SH, Filipiak P, Dong T, Fan Q, de Luis-García R, Tristán-Vega A, Pieciak T. Validation of deep learning techniques for quality augmentation in diffusion MRI for clinical studies. Neuroimage Clin 2023; 39:103483. [PMID: 37572514 PMCID: PMC10440596 DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2023.103483] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/02/2023] [Revised: 07/24/2023] [Accepted: 07/25/2023] [Indexed: 08/14/2023]
Abstract
The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of deep learning (DL) techniques in improving the quality of diffusion MRI (dMRI) data in clinical applications. The study aims to determine whether the use of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in medical images may result in the loss of critical clinical information and/or the appearance of false information. To assess this, the focus was on the angular resolution of dMRI and a clinical trial was conducted on migraine, specifically between episodic and chronic migraine patients. The number of gradient directions had an impact on white matter analysis results, with statistically significant differences between groups being drastically reduced when using 21 gradient directions instead of the original 61. Fourteen teams from different institutions were tasked to use DL to enhance three diffusion metrics (FA, AD and MD) calculated from data acquired with 21 gradient directions and a b-value of 1000 s/mm2. The goal was to produce results that were comparable to those calculated from 61 gradient directions. The results were evaluated using both standard image quality metrics and Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) to compare episodic and chronic migraine patients. The study results suggest that while most DL techniques improved the ability to detect statistical differences between groups, they also led to an increase in false positive. The results showed that there was a constant growth rate of false positives linearly proportional to the new true positives, which highlights the risk of generalization of AI-based tasks when assessing diverse clinical cohorts and training using data from a single group. The methods also showed divergent performance when replicating the original distribution of the data and some exhibited significant bias. In conclusion, extreme caution should be exercised when using AI methods for harmonization or synthesis in clinical studies when processing heterogeneous data in clinical studies, as important information may be altered, even when global metrics such as structural similarity or peak signal-to-noise ratio appear to suggest otherwise.
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Affiliation(s)
- Santiago Aja-Fernández
- Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen (LPI), ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain.
| | - Carmen Martín-Martín
- Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen (LPI), ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
| | - Álvaro Planchuelo-Gómez
- Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen (LPI), ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain; Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Dan Wu
- Zhejiang University, China
| | | | | | | | | | | | - Zihan Li
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, USA
| | - Berkin Bilgic
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, USA
| | - Qiyuan Tian
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, USA
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Zan Chen
- Zhejiang University of Technology, China
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | - Rodrigo de Luis-García
- Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen (LPI), ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
| | - Antonio Tristán-Vega
- Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen (LPI), ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
| | - Tomasz Pieciak
- Laboratorio de Procesado de Imagen (LPI), ETSI Telecomunicación, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
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11
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Ghazi N, Aarabi MH, Soltanian-Zadeh H. Deep Learning Methods for Identification of White Matter Fiber Tracts: Review of State-of-the-Art and Future Prospective. Neuroinformatics 2023; 21:517-548. [PMID: 37328715 DOI: 10.1007/s12021-023-09636-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 05/20/2023] [Indexed: 06/18/2023]
Abstract
Quantitative analysis of white matter fiber tracts from diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) data is of great significance in health and disease. For example, analysis of fiber tracts related to anatomically meaningful fiber bundles is highly demanded in pre-surgical and treatment planning, and the surgery outcome depends on accurate segmentation of the desired tracts. Currently, this process is mainly done through time-consuming manual identification performed by neuro-anatomical experts. However, there is a broad interest in automating the pipeline such that it is fast, accurate, and easy to apply in clinical settings and also eliminates the intra-reader variabilities. Following the advancements in medical image analysis using deep learning techniques, there has been a growing interest in using these techniques for the task of tract identification as well. Recent reports on this application show that deep learning-based tract identification approaches outperform existing state-of-the-art methods. This paper presents a review of current tract identification approaches based on deep neural networks. First, we review the recent deep learning methods for tract identification. Next, we compare them with respect to their performance, training process, and network properties. Finally, we end with a critical discussion of open challenges and possible directions for future works.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nayereh Ghazi
- Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence (CIPCE), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, 14399, Iran
| | - Mohammad Hadi Aarabi
- Department of Neuroscience, University of Padova, Padova, Italy
- Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC), University of Padova, Padova, Italy
| | - Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh
- Control and Intelligent Processing Center of Excellence (CIPCE), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, 14399, Iran.
- Medical Image Analysis Laboratory, Departments of Radiology and Research Administration, Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, MI, 48202, USA.
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12
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Chen Y, Zhang C, Xue T, Song Y, Makris N, Rathi Y, Cai W, Zhang F, O'Donnell LJ. Deep fiber clustering: Anatomically informed fiber clustering with self-supervised deep learning for fast and effective tractography parcellation. Neuroimage 2023; 273:120086. [PMID: 37019346 PMCID: PMC10958986 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120086] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/13/2023] [Accepted: 04/02/2023] [Indexed: 04/05/2023] Open
Abstract
White matter fiber clustering is an important strategy for white matter parcellation, which enables quantitative analysis of brain connections in health and disease. In combination with expert neuroanatomical labeling, data-driven white matter fiber clustering is a powerful tool for creating atlases that can model white matter anatomy across individuals. While widely used fiber clustering approaches have shown good performance using classical unsupervised machine learning techniques, recent advances in deep learning reveal a promising direction toward fast and effective fiber clustering. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning framework for white matter fiber clustering, Deep Fiber Clustering (DFC), which solves the unsupervised clustering problem as a self-supervised learning task with a domain-specific pretext task to predict pairwise fiber distances. This process learns a high-dimensional embedding feature representation for each fiber, regardless of the order of fiber points reconstructed during tractography. We design a novel network architecture that represents input fibers as point clouds and allows the incorporation of additional sources of input information from gray matter parcellation. Thus, DFC makes use of combined information about white matter fiber geometry and gray matter anatomy to improve the anatomical coherence of fiber clusters. In addition, DFC conducts outlier removal naturally by rejecting fibers with low cluster assignment probability. We evaluate DFC on three independently acquired cohorts, including data from 220 individuals across genders, ages (young and elderly adults), and different health conditions (healthy control and multiple neuropsychiatric disorders). We compare DFC to several state-of-the-art white matter fiber clustering algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance of DFC in terms of cluster compactness, generalization ability, anatomical coherence, and computational efficiency.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuqian Chen
- Harvard Medical School, MA, USA; The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | | | - Tengfei Xue
- Harvard Medical School, MA, USA; The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Yang Song
- The University of New South Wales, NSW, Australia
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13
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Jin R, Cai Y, Zhang S, Yang T, Feng H, Jiang H, Zhang X, Hu Y, Liu J. Computational approaches for the reconstruction of optic nerve fibers along the visual pathway from medical images: a comprehensive review. Front Neurosci 2023; 17:1191999. [PMID: 37304011 PMCID: PMC10250625 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1191999] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/22/2023] [Accepted: 05/09/2023] [Indexed: 06/13/2023] Open
Abstract
Optic never fibers in the visual pathway play significant roles in vision formation. Damages of optic nerve fibers are biomarkers for the diagnosis of various ophthalmological and neurological diseases; also, there is a need to prevent the optic nerve fibers from getting damaged in neurosurgery and radiation therapy. Reconstruction of optic nerve fibers from medical images can facilitate all these clinical applications. Although many computational methods are developed for the reconstruction of optic nerve fibers, a comprehensive review of these methods is still lacking. This paper described both the two strategies for optic nerve fiber reconstruction applied in existing studies, i.e., image segmentation and fiber tracking. In comparison to image segmentation, fiber tracking can delineate more detailed structures of optic nerve fibers. For each strategy, both conventional and AI-based approaches were introduced, and the latter usually demonstrates better performance than the former. From the review, we concluded that AI-based methods are the trend for optic nerve fiber reconstruction and some new techniques like generative AI can help address the current challenges in optic nerve fiber reconstruction.
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Affiliation(s)
- Richu Jin
- Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Yongning Cai
- Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Shiyang Zhang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Ting Yang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Haibo Feng
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Hongyang Jiang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Xiaoqing Zhang
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Yan Hu
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
| | - Jiang Liu
- Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
- Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Computation, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China
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