Other researchers have proposed that the brain parenchymal fraction (or brain atrophy) may be a good surrogate measure for disease progression in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. This paper considers various factors influencing the measure of the brain parenchymal fraction obtained from dual spin-echo PD and T2-weighted head MRI scans. We investigate the robustness of the brain parenchymal fraction with respect to two factors: brain-mask border placement which determines the brain intra-dural volume, and brain scan incompleteness. We show that an automatic method for brain segmentation produces an atrophy measure which is fairly sensitive to the brain-mask placement. We also show that a robust, reproducible brain atrophy measure can be obtained from incomplete brain scans, using data in a centrally placed subvolume of the brain.
Conventional methods to diagnose and follow treatment of Multiple Sclerosis require radiologists and technicians to compare current images with older images of a particular patient, on a slic-by-slice basis. Although there has been progress in creating 3D displays of medical images, little attempt has been made to design visual tools that emphasize change over time. We implemented several ideas that attempt to address this deficiency. In one approach, isosurfaces of segmented lesions at each time step were displayed either on the same image (each time step in a different color), or consecutively in an animation. In a second approach, voxel- wise differences between time steps were calculated and displayed statically using ray casting. Animation was used to show cumulative changes over time. Finally, in a method borrowed from computational fluid dynamics (CFD), glyphs (small arrow-like objects) were rendered with a surface model of the lesions to indicate changes at localized points.
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
Visualization and Data Analysis 2011
24 January 2011 | San Francisco Airport, California, United States
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