An Anatomically Curated Fiber Clustering White Matter Atlas for Consistent White Matter Tract Parcellation across the Lifespan
An Immersive Virtual Reality Environment for Diagnostic Imaging
Inter-site and Inter-scanner Diffusion MRI Data Harmonization
The Open Anatomy Browser: A Collaborative Web-Based Viewer for Interoperable Anatomy Atlases
Unsupervised Discovery of Emphysema Subtypes in a Large Clinical Cohort
Identifying Shared Brain Networks in Individuals by Decoupling Functional and Anatomical Variability
Supra-Threshold Fiber Cluster Statistics for Data-Driven Whole Brain Tractography Analysis
Free Water Modeling of Peritumoral Edema using Multi-fiber Tractography
Estimation of Bounded and Unbounded Trajectories in Diffusion MRI
Principal Gradient of Macroscale Cortical Organization
Slide 10
Evolution of a Simultaneous Segmentation and Atlas Registration
Multi-modality MRI-based Atlas of the Brain
Intracranial Fluid Redistribution
Corticospinal Tract Modeling for Neurosurgical Planning by Tracking through Regions of Peritumoral Edema and Crossing Fibers
Automated White Matter Fiber Tract Identification in Patients with Brain Tumors
State-space Models of Mental Processes from fMRI
Robust Initialization of Active Shape Models for Lung Segmentation in CT Scans: A Feature-Based Atlas Approach
Tractography-driven Groupwise Multi-Scale Parcellation of the Cortex
Gray Matter Alterations in Early Aging
Statistical Shape Analysis: From Landmarks to Diffeomorphisms
A Generative Probabilistic Model and Discriminative Extensions for Brain Lesion Segmentation
Joint Modeling of Imaging and Genetic Variability
MR-Ultrasound Fusion for Neurosurgery
Diffusion MRI and Tumor Heterogeneity
SlicerDMRI: Open Source Diffusion MRI Software for Brain Cancer Research

Neuroimage Analysis Center

The Neuroimaging Analysis Center is a research and technology center with the mission of advancing the role of neuroimaging in health care. The ability to access huge cohorts of patient medical records and radiology data, the emergence of ever-more detailed imaging modalities, and the availability of unprecedented computer processing power marks the possibility for a new era in neuroimaging, disease understanding, and patient treatment. We are excited to present a national resource center with the goal of finding new ways of extracting disease characteristics from advanced imaging and computation, and to make these methods available to the larger medical community through a proven methodology of world-class research, open-source software, and extensive collaboration.

Our Sponsor

NIBIB

The NAC is a Biomedical Technology Resource Center supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) (P41 EB015902). It was supported by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) (P41 RR13218) through December 2011.

Contact the Center Directors

Westin

Carl-Fredrik Westin, PhD
Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging
Brigham and Women's Hospital
1249 Boylston St., Room 240
Boston, MA 02215
Phone: +1 617 525-6209
E-mail: westin at bwh.harvard.edu
 

Ron Kikinis

Ron Kikinis, MD
Surgical Planning Laboratory 
Brigham and Women's Hospital 
75 Francis St, L1 Room 050
Boston, MA 02115
Phone: +1 617 732-7389
E-mail: kikinis at bwh.harvard.edu
 

 

News

Recent Publications

  • Chad JA, Sochen N, Chen J, Pasternak O. Implications of fitting a two-compartment model in single-shell diffusion MRI. Physics in medicine and biology. 2023;68(21).

    It is becoming increasingly common for studies to fit single-shell diffusion MRI data to a two-compartment model, which comprises a hindered cellular compartment and a freely diffusing isotropic compartment. These studies consistently find that the fraction of the isotropic compartment (f) is sensitive to white matter (WM) conditions and pathologies, although the actual biological source of changes infhas not been validated. In this work we put aside the biological interpretation offand study the sensitivity implications of fitting single-shell data to a two-compartment model. We identify a nonlinear transformation between the one-compartment model (diffusion tensor imaging, DTI) and a two-compartment model in which the mean diffusivities of both compartments are effectively fixed. While the analytic relationship implies that fitting this two-compartment model does not offer any more information than DTI, it explains why metrics derived from a two-compartment model can exhibit enhanced sensitivity over DTI to certain types of WM processes, such as age-related WM differences. The sensitivity enhancement should not be viewed as a substitute for acquiring multi-shell data. Rather, the results of this study provide insight into the consequences of choosing a two-compartment model when only single-shell data is available.

  • Mehrtash A, Ziegler E, Idris T, Somarouthu B, Urban T, LaCasce AS, Jacene H, Van Den Abbeele AD, Pieper S, Harris G, Kikinis R, Kapur T. Evaluation of mediastinal lymph node segmentation of heterogeneous CT data with full and weak supervision. Computerized medical imaging and graphics : the official journal of the Computerized Medical Imaging Society. 2024;111:102312.

    Accurate lymph node size estimation is critical for staging cancer patients, initial therapeutic management, and assessing response to therapy. Current standard practice for quantifying lymph node size is based on a variety of criteria that use uni-directional or bi-directional measurements. Segmentation in 3D can provide more accurate evaluations of the lymph node size. Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in segmentation for numerous medical imaging applications, including lymph node segmentation. Adoption of deep learning segmentation models in clinical trials often faces numerous challenges. These include lack of pixel-level ground truth annotations for training, generalizability of the models on unseen test domains due to the heterogeneity of test cases and variation of imaging parameters. In this paper, we studied and evaluated the performance of lymph node segmentation models on a dataset that was completely independent of the one used to create the models. We analyzed the generalizability of the models in the face of a heterogeneous dataset and assessed the potential effects of different disease conditions and imaging parameters. Furthermore, we systematically compared fully-supervised and weakly-supervised methods in this context. We evaluated the proposed methods using an independent dataset comprising 806 mediastinal lymph nodes from 540 unique patients. The results show that performance achieved on the independent test set is comparable to that on the training set. Furthermore, neither the underlying disease nor the heterogeneous imaging parameters impacted the performance of the models. Finally, the results indicate that our weakly-supervised method attains 90%- 91% of the performance achieved by the fully supervised training.

  • Arasteh ST, Romanowicz J, Pace DF, Golland P, Powell AJ, Maier AK, Truhn D, Brosch T, Weese J, Lotfinia M, van der Geest RJ, Moghari MH. Automated segmentation of 3D cine cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging. Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine. 2023;10:1167500.

    INTRODUCTION: As the life expectancy of children with congenital heart disease (CHD) is rapidly increasing and the adult population with CHD is growing, there is an unmet need to improve clinical workflow and efficiency of analysis. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is a noninvasive imaging modality for monitoring patients with CHD. CMR exam is based on multiple breath-hold 2-dimensional (2D) cine acquisitions that should be precisely prescribed and is expert and institution dependent. Moreover, 2D cine images have relatively thick slices, which does not allow for isotropic delineation of ventricular structures. Thus, development of an isotropic 3D cine acquisition and automatic segmentation method is worthwhile to make CMR workflow straightforward and efficient, as the present work aims to establish.

    METHODS: Ninety-nine patients with many types of CHD were imaged using a non-angulated 3D cine CMR sequence covering the whole-heart and great vessels. Automatic supervised and semi-supervised deep-learning-based methods were developed for whole-heart segmentation of 3D cine images to separately delineate the cardiac structures, including both atria, both ventricles, aorta, pulmonary arteries, and superior and inferior vena cavae. The segmentation results derived from the two methods were compared with the manual segmentation in terms of Dice score, a degree of overlap agreement, and atrial and ventricular volume measurements.

    RESULTS: The semi-supervised method resulted in a better overlap agreement with the manual segmentation than the supervised method for all 8 structures (Dice score 83.23 ± 16.76% vs. 77.98 ± 19.64%; P-value ≤0.001). The mean difference error in atrial and ventricular volumetric measurements between manual segmentation and semi-supervised method was lower (bias ≤ 5.2 ml) than the supervised method (bias ≤ 10.1 ml).

    DISCUSSION: The proposed semi-supervised method is capable of cardiac segmentation and chamber volume quantification in a CHD population with wide anatomical variability. It accurately delineates the heart chambers and great vessels and can be used to accurately calculate ventricular and atrial volumes throughout the cardiac cycle. Such a segmentation method can reduce inter- and intra- observer variability and make CMR exams more standardized and efficient.

  • Safdar S, Zwick BF, Yu Y, Bourantas GC, Joldes GR, Warfield SK, Hyde DE, Frisken S, Kapur T, Kikinis R, Golby A, Nabavi A, Wittek A, Miller K. SlicerCBM: automatic framework for biomechanical analysis of the brain. International journal of computer assisted radiology and surgery. 2023;18(10):1925–1940.

    PURPOSE: Brain shift that occurs during neurosurgery disturbs the brain's anatomy. Prediction of the brain shift is essential for accurate localisation of the surgical target. Biomechanical models have been envisaged as a possible tool for such predictions. In this study, we created a framework to automate the workflow for predicting intra-operative brain deformations.

    METHODS: We created our framework by uniquely combining our meshless total Lagrangian explicit dynamics (MTLED) algorithm for computing soft tissue deformations, open-source software libraries and built-in functions within 3D Slicer, an open-source software package widely used for medical research. Our framework generates the biomechanical brain model from the pre-operative MRI, computes brain deformation using MTLED and outputs results in the form of predicted warped intra-operative MRI.

    RESULTS: Our framework is used to solve three different neurosurgical brain shift scenarios: craniotomy, tumour resection and electrode placement. We evaluated our framework using nine patients. The average time to construct a patient-specific brain biomechanical model was 3 min, and that to compute deformations ranged from 13 to 23 min. We performed a qualitative evaluation by comparing our predicted intra-operative MRI with the actual intra-operative MRI. For quantitative evaluation, we computed Hausdorff distances between predicted and actual intra-operative ventricle surfaces. For patients with craniotomy and tumour resection, approximately 95% of the nodes on the ventricle surfaces are within two times the original in-plane resolution of the actual surface determined from the intra-operative MRI.

    CONCLUSION: Our framework provides a broader application of existing solution methods not only in research but also in clinics. We successfully demonstrated the application of our framework by predicting intra-operative deformations in nine patients undergoing neurosurgical procedures.

  • Costello H, Yamamori Y, Reeves S, Schrag AE, Howard R, Roiser JP. Longitudinal decline in striatal dopamine transporter binding in Parkinson’s disease: associations with apathy and anhedonia. Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry. 2023;94(10):863–870.

    BACKGROUND: Motivational symptoms such as apathy and anhedonia are common in Parkinson's disease (PD), respond poorly to treatment, and are hypothesised to share underlying neural mechanisms. Striatal dopaminergic dysfunction is considered central to motivational symptoms in PD but the association has never been examined longitudinally. We investigated whether progression of dopaminergic dysfunction was associated with emergent apathy and anhedonia symptoms in PD.

    METHODS: Longitudinal cohort study of 412 newly diagnosed patients with PD followed over 5 years as part of the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative cohort.Apathy and anhedonia were measured using a composite score derived from relevant items of the 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15) and part I of the MDS-Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale. Dopaminergic neurodegeneration was measured using repeated striatal dopamine transporter (DAT) imaging.

    RESULTS: Linear mixed-effects modelling across all contemporaneous data points identified a significant negative relationship between striatal DAT specific binding ratio (SBR) and apathy/anhedonia symptoms, which emerged as PD progressed (interaction:β=-0.09, 95% CI (-0.15 to -0.03), p=0.002). Appearance and subsequent worsening of apathy/anhedonia symptoms began on average 2 years after diagnosis and below a threshold striatal DAT SBR level. The interaction between striatal DAT SBR and time was specific to apathy/anhedonia symptoms, with no evidence of a similar interaction for general depressive symptoms from the GDS-15 (excluding apathy/anhedonia items) (β=-0.06, 95% CI (-0.13 to 0.01)) or motor symptoms (β=0.20, 95% CI (-0.25 to 0.65)).

    CONCLUSIONS: Our findings support a central role for dopaminergic dysfunction in motivational symptoms in PD. Striatal DAT imaging may be a useful indicator of apathy/anhedonia risk that could inform intervention strategies.