Automatic segmentation of brain tissues and MR bias field correction using a digital brain atlas

Using quantitative multi-parameter mapping (MPM), studies can investigate clinically relevant microstructural changes with high reliability over time and across subjects and sites. However, long acquisition times (20 min for the standard 1-mm isotropic protocol) limit its translational potential. This study aimed to evaluate the sensitivity gain of a fast 1.6-mm isotropic MPM protocol including post-processing optimized for longitudinal clinical studies. 6 healthy volunteers (35±7 years old; 3 female) were scanned at 3T to acquire the following whole-brain MPM maps with 1.6 mm isotropic resolution: proton density (PD), magnetization transfer saturation (MT), longitudinal relaxation rate (R1), and transverse relaxation rate (R2*). MPM maps were generated using two RF transmit field (B1+) correction methods: (1) using an acquired B1+ map and (2) using a data-driven approach. Maps were generated with and without Gibb's ringing correction. The intra-/inter-subject coefficient of variation (CoV) of all maps in the gray and white matter, as well as in all anatomical regions of a fine-grained brain atlas, were compared between the different post-processing methods using Student's t-test. The intra-subject stability of the 1.6-mm MPM protocol is 2–3 times higher than for the standard 1-mm sequence and can be achieved in less than half the scan duration. Intra-subject variability for all four maps in white matter ranged from 1.2–5.3% and in gray matter from 1.8 to 9.2%. Bias-field correction using an acquired B1+ map significantly improved intra-subject variability of PD and R1 in the gray (42%) and white matter (54%) and correcting the raw images for the effect of Gibb's ringing further improved intra-subject variability in all maps in the gray (11%) and white matter (10%). Combining Gibb's ringing correction and bias field correction using acquired B1+ maps provides excellent stability of the 7-min MPM sequence with 1.6 mm resolution suitable for the clinical routine.

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Brain MR Image Enhancement for Tumor Segmentation Using 3D U-Net

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21227528 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (22) ◽

pp. 7528

Author(s):

Faizad Ullah ◽

Shahab U. Ansari ◽

Muhammad Hanif ◽

Mohamed Arselene Ayari ◽

Muhammad Enamul Hoque Chowdhury ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Automatic Segmentation ◽

Bias Field ◽

Histogram Equalization ◽

Tumor Segmentation ◽

Artifact Removal ◽

Brain Tumor Segmentation ◽

Domain Experts ◽

Bias Field Correction ◽

Important Challenge ◽

Ringing Artifact

MRI images are visually inspected by domain experts for the analysis and quantification of the tumorous tissues. Due to the large volumetric data, manual reporting on the images is subjective, cumbersome, and error prone. To address these problems, automatic image analysis tools are employed for tumor segmentation and other subsequent statistical analysis. However, prior to the tumor analysis and quantification, an important challenge lies in the pre-processing. In the present study, permutations of different pre-processing methods are comprehensively investigated. In particular, the study focused on Gibbs ringing artifact removal, bias field correction, intensity normalization, and adaptive histogram equalization (AHE). The pre-processed MRI data is then passed onto 3D U-Net for automatic segmentation of brain tumors. The segmentation results demonstrated the best performance with the combination of two techniques, i.e., Gibbs ringing artifact removal and bias-field correction. The proposed technique achieved mean dice score metrics of 0.91, 0.86, and 0.70 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The testing mean dice scores achieved by the system are 0.90, 0.83, and 0.71 for the whole tumor, core tumor, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The novelty of this work concerns a robust pre-processing sequence for improving the segmentation accuracy of MR images. The proposed method overcame the testing dice scores of the state-of-the-art methods. The results are benchmarked with the existing techniques used in the Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) 2018 challenge.

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Robust Finger Vein Recognition Based on Deep CNN with Spatial Attention and Bias Field Correction

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools ◽

10.1142/s0218213021400054 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 30 (01) ◽

pp. 2140005

Author(s):

Zhe Huang ◽

Chengan Guo

Keyword(s):

Spatial Attention ◽

Transfer Learning ◽

Learning Strategy ◽

Bias Field ◽

The Public ◽

Finger Vein ◽

Bias Field Correction ◽

Training Samples ◽

Vein Recognition ◽

Finger Vein Recognition

As one of the biometric information based authentication technologies, finger vein recognition has received increasing attention due to its safety and convenience. However, it is still a challenging task to design an efficient and robust finger vein recognition system because of the low quality of the finger vein images, lack of sufficient number of training samples with image-level annotated information and no pixel-level finger vein texture labels in the public available finger vein databases. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN-based finger vein recognition approach with bias field correction, spatial attention mechanism and a multistage transfer learning strategy to cope with the difficulties mentioned above. In the proposed method, the bias field correction module is to remove the unbalanced bias field of the original images by using a two-dimensional polynomial fitting algorithm, the spatial attention module is to enhance the informative vein texture regions while suppressing the other less informative regions, and the multistage transfer learning strategy is to solve the problem caused by insufficient training for CNN-based model due to lack of labeled training samples in the public finger vein databases. Moreover, several measures, including a label smoothing scheme and data augmentation, are exploited to improve the performance of the proposed method. Extensive experiments have been conducted in the work on three public databases, and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

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