Intensive international efforts are underway toward phenotyping the entire mouse genome by modifying all its ≈25,000 genes one-by-one for comparative studies. A workload of this scale has triggered numerous studies harnessing image informatics for the identification of morphological defects. However, existing work in this line primarily rests on abnormality detection via structural volumetrics between wild-type and gene-modified mice, which generally fails when the pathology involves no severe volume changes, such as ventricular septal defects (VSDs) in the heart. Furthermore, in embryo cardiac phenotyping, the lack of relevant work in embryonic heart segmentation, the limited availability of public atlases, and the general requirement of manual labor for the actual phenotype classification after abnormality detection, along with other limitations, have collectively restricted existing practices from meeting the high-throughput demands. This study proposes, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully automatic VSD classification framework in mouse embryo imaging. Our approach leverages a combination of atlas-based segmentation and snake evolution techniques to derive the segmentation of heart ventricles, where VSD classification is achieved by checking whether the left and right ventricles border or overlap with each other. A pilot study has validated our approach at a proof-of-concept level and achieved a classification accuracy of 100% through a series of empirical experiments on a database of 15 images.
The goal of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC, www.mousephenotype.org) is to study all the over 23,000 genes in the mouse by knocking them out one-by-one for comparative analysis. Large amounts of knockout mouse lines have been raised, leading to a strong demand for high-throughput phenotyping technologies. Traditional means via time-consuming histological examination is clearly unsuitable in this scenario. Biomedical imaging technologies such as CT and MRI therefore have started being used to develop more efficient phenotyping approaches. Existing work however primarily rests on volumetric analytics over anatomical structures to detect anomaly, yet this type of methods generally fail when features are subtle such as ventricular septal defects (VSD) in the heart, and meanwhile phenotypic assessment normally requires expert manual labor. This study proposes, to the best of our knowledge, the first automatic VSD diagnostic system for mouse embryos. Our algorithm starts with the creation of an atlas using wild-type mouse images, followed by registration of knockouts to the atlas to perform atlas-based segmentation on the heart and then ventricles, after which ventricle segmentation is further refined using a region growing technique. VSD classification is completed by checking the existence of an overlap between left and right ventricles. Our approach has been validated on a database of 14 mouse embryo images, and achieved an overall accuracy of 90.9%, with sensitivity of 66.7% and specificity of 100%.
Automatic segmentation of the breast, chest wall and heart is an important pre-processing step for automatic lesion detection of breast MR and dynamic contrast-enhanced MR studies. In this paper, we present a fully automatic segmentation procedure of multiple organs in breast MRI images using multi-atlas based methods. Our method starts by reducing the image inhomogeneity using anisotropic fusion method. We then build multiple atlases with labels of breast, chest wall and heart. These atlases are registered to a target image to obtain warped organ labels that are aligned to the target image. Given the warped organ labels, segmentation is performed via label fusion. In this paper, we evaluate various label fusion methods and compare their performance on segmenting multiple anatomical structures in breast MRI.
We propose an automated method in detecting lesions to assist radiologists in interpreting dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) of breast. The aim is to highlight the suspicious regions of interest to reduce the searching time of the lesions and the possibility of radiologists overlooking small regions. In our method, we locate the suspicious regions by applying a threshold on essential features. The features are normalized to reduce the variation between patients. Support vector machine classifier is then applied to exclude normal tissues from these regions, using both kinetic and morphological features extracted in the lesions. In the evaluation of the system on 21 patients with 50 lesions, all lesions were successfully detected with 5.02 false positive regions per breast.
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