Darko Stern

Parametric modelling and segmentation of vertebral bodies in 3D CT and MR spine images

Accurate and objective evaluation of vertebral deformations is of significant importance in clinical diagnostics and therapy of pathological conditions affecting the spine. Although modern clinical practice is focused on three-dimensional (3D) computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging techniques, the established methods for evaluation of vertebral deformations are limited to measuring deformations in two-dimensional (2D) x-ray images. In this paper, we propose a method for quantitative description of vertebral body deformations by efficient modelling and segmentation of vertebral bodies in 3D. The deformations are evaluated from the parameters of a 3D superquadric model, which is initialized as an elliptical cylinder and then gradually deformed by introducing transformations that yield a more detailed representation of the vertebral body shape. After modelling the vertebral body shape with 25 clinically meaningful parameters and the vertebral body pose with six rigid body parameters, the 3D model is aligned to the observed vertebral body in the 3D image. The performance of the method was evaluated on 75 vertebrae from CT and 75 vertebrae from T(2)-weighted MR spine images, extracted from the thoracolumbar part of normal and pathological spines. The results show that the proposed method can be used for 3D segmentation of vertebral bodies in CT and MR images, as the proposed 3D model is able to describe both normal and pathological vertebral body deformations. The method may therefore be used for initialization of whole vertebra segmentation or for quantitative measurement of vertebral body deformations.

Automated detection of spinal centrelines, vertebral bodies and intervertebral discs in CT and MR images of lumbar spine

We propose a completely automated algorithm for the detection of the spinal centreline and the centres of vertebral bodies and intervertebral discs in images acquired by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. The developed methods are based on the analysis of the geometry of spinal structures and the characteristics of CT and MR images and were evaluated on 29 CT and 13 MR images of lumbar spine. The overall mean distance between the obtained and the ground truth spinal centrelines and centres of vertebral bodies and intervertebral discs were 1.8 +/- 1.1 mm and 2.8 +/- 1.9 mm, respectively, and no considerable differences were detected among the results for CT, T(1)-weighted MR and T(2)-weighted MR images. The knowledge of the location of the spinal centreline and the centres of vertebral bodies and intervertebral discs is valuable for the analysis of the spine. The proposed method may therefore be used to initialize the techniques for labelling and segmentation of vertebrae.

Regressing Heatmaps for Multiple Landmark Localization Using CNNs

We explore the applicability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for multiple landmark localization in medical image data. Exploiting the idea of regressing heatmaps for individual landmark locations, we investigate several fully convolutional 2D and 3D CNN architectures by training them in an end-to-end manner. We further propose a novel SpatialConfiguration-Net architecture that effectively combines accurate local appearance responses with spatial landmark configurations that model anatomical variation. Evaluation of our different architectures on 2D and 3D hand image datasets show that heatmap regression based on CNNs achieves state-of-the-art landmark localization performance, with SpatialConfiguration-Net being robust even in case of limited amounts of training data.

Towards Automatic Bone Age Estimation from MRI: Localization of 3D Anatomical Landmarks

Bone age estimation (BAE) is an important procedure in forensic practice which recently has seen a shift in attention from X-ray to MRI based imaging. To automate BAE from MRI, localization of the joints between hand bones is a crucial first step, which is challenging due to anatomical variations, different poses and repeating structures within the hand. We propose a landmark localization algorithm using multiple random regression forests, first analyzing the shape of the hand from information of the whole image, thus implicitly modeling the global landmark configuration, followed by a refinement based on more local information to increase prediction accuracy. We are able to clearly outperform related approaches on our dataset of 60 T1-weighted MR images, achieving a mean landmark localization error of 1.4 ± 1.5mm, while having only 0.25% outliers with an error greater than 10mm.

Vertebrae Segmentation in 3D CT Images based on a Variational Framework

Automatic segmentation of 3D vertebrae is a challenging task in medical imaging. In this paper, we introduce a total variation (TV) based framework that incorporates an a priori model, i.e., a vertebral mean shape, image intensity and edge information. The algorithm was evaluated using leave-one-out cross validation on a data set containing ten computed tomography scans and ground truth segmentations provided for the CSI MICCAI 2014 spine and vertebrae segmentation challenge. We achieve promising results in terms of the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of \(0.93 \pm 0.04\) averaged over the whole data set.

Evaluation and comparison of 3D intervertebral disc localization and segmentation methods for 3D T2 MR data: A grand challenge.

&NA; The evaluation of changes in Intervertebral Discs (IVDs) with 3D Magnetic Resonance (MR) Imaging (MRI) can be of interest for many clinical applications. This paper presents the evaluation of both IVD localization and IVD segmentation methods submitted to the Automatic 3D MRI IVD Localization and Segmentation challenge, held at the 2015 International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI2015) with an on‐site competition. With the construction of a manually annotated reference data set composed of 25 3D T2‐weighted MR images acquired from two different studies and the establishment of a standard validation framework, quantitative evaluation was performed to compare the results of methods submitted to the challenge. Experimental results show that overall the best localization method achieves a mean localization distance of 0.8 mm and the best segmentation method achieves a mean Dice of 91.8%, a mean average absolute distance of 1.1 mm and a mean Hausdorff distance of 4.3 mm, respectively. The strengths and drawbacks of each method are discussed, which provides insights into the performance of different IVD localization and segmentation methods. HighlightsEstablish a standard framework with 25 manually annotated 3D T2 MRI data for an objective comparison of intervertebral disc (IVD) localization and segmentation methods.Investigate strengths and limitations of a representative selection of the state‐of‐the‐art IVD localization and segmentation methods with a challenge setup.Results achieved by the best algorithms in this study set new frontiers for IVD localization and segmentation from MR data. Graphical abstract Figure. No caption available.

What automated age estimation of hand and wrist MRI data tells us about skeletal maturation in male adolescents.

Abstract Background: Age estimation of individuals is important in human biology and has various medical and forensic applications. Recent interest in MR-based methods aims to investigate alternatives for established methods involving ionising radiation. Automatic, software-based methods additionally promise improved estimation objectivity. Aim: To investigate how informative automatically selected image features are regarding their ability to discriminate age, by exploring a recently proposed software-based age estimation method for MR images of the left hand and wrist. Subjects and methods: One hundred and two MR datasets of left hand images are used to evaluate age estimation performance, consisting of bone and epiphyseal gap volume localisation, computation of one age regression model per bone mapping image features to age and fusion of individual bone age predictions to a final age estimate. Results: Quantitative results of the software-based method show an age estimation performance with a mean absolute difference of 0.85 years (SD = 0.58 years) to chronological age, as determined by a cross-validation experiment. Qualitatively, it is demonstrated how feature selection works and which image features of skeletal maturation are automatically chosen to model the non-linear regression function. Conclusion: Feasibility of automatic age estimation based on MRI data is shown and selected image features are found to be informative for describing anatomical changes during physical maturation in male adolescents.

From Local to Global Random Regression Forests: Exploring Anatomical Landmark Localization

State of the art anatomical landmark localization algorithms pair local Random Forest (RF) detection with disambiguation of locally similar structures by including high level knowledge about relative landmark locations. In this work we pursue the question, how much high-level knowledge is needed in addition to a single landmark localization RF to implicitly model the global configuration of multiple, potentially ambiguous landmarks. We further propose a novel RF localization algorithm that distinguishes locally similar structures by automatically identifying them, exploring the back-projection of the response from accurate local RF predictions. In our experiments we show that this approach achieves competitive results in single and multi-landmark localization when applied to 2D hand radiographic and 3D teeth MRI data sets. Additionally, when combined with a simple Markov Random Field model, we are able to outperform state of the art methods.

Fully Automatic Bone Age Estimation from Left Hand MR Images

There has recently been an increased demand in bone age estimation (BAE) of living individuals and human remains in legal medicine applications. A severe drawback of established BAE techniques based on X-ray images is radiation exposure, since many countries prohibit scanning involving ionizing radiation without diagnostic reasons. We propose a completely automated method for BAE based on volumetric hand MRI images. On our database of 56 male caucasian subjects between 13 and 19 years, we are able to estimate the subjects age with a mean difference of 0.85 ± 0.58 years compared to the chronological age, which is in line with radiologist results using established radiographic methods. We see this work as a promising first step towards a novel MRI based bone age estimation system, with the key benefits of lacking exposure to ionizing radiation and higher accuracy due to exploitation of volumetric data.

Segmentation of vertebral bodies in CT and MR images based on 3D deterministic models

The evaluation of vertebral deformations is of great importance in clinical diagnostics and therapy of pathological conditions affecting the spine. Although modern clinical practice is oriented towards the computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging techniques, as they can provide a detailed 3D representation of vertebrae, the established methods for the evaluation of vertebral deformations still provide only a two-dimensional (2D) geometrical description. Segmentation of vertebrae in 3D may therefore not only improve their visualization, but also provide reliable and accurate 3D measurements of vertebral deformations. In this paper we propose a method for 3D segmentation of individual vertebral bodies that can be performed in CT and MR images. Initialized with a single point inside the vertebral body, the segmentation is performed by optimizing the parameters of a 3D deterministic model of the vertebral body to achieve the best match of the model to the vertebral body in the image. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on five CT (40 vertebrae) and five T2-weighted MR (40 vertebrae) spine images, among them five are normal and five are pathological. The results show that the proposed method can be used for 3D segmentation of vertebral bodies in CT and MR images and that the proposed model can describe a variety of vertebral body shapes. The method may be therefore used for initializing whole vertebra segmentation or reliably describing vertebral body deformations.