Automated lesion detection by regressing intensity-based distance with a neural network

TY - GEN

T1 - Automated lesion detection by regressing intensity-based distance with a neural network

AU - van Wijnen, Kimberlin M.H.

AU - Dubost, Florian

AU - Yilmaz, Pinar

AU - Ikram, M. Arfan

AU - Niessen, Wiro J.

AU - Adams, Hieab

AU - Vernooij, Meike W.

AU - de Bruijne, Marleen

PY - 2019/1/1

Y1 - 2019/1/1

N2 - Localization of focal vascular lesions on brain MRI is an important component of research on the etiology of neurological disorders. However, manual annotation of lesions can be challenging, time-consuming and subject to observer bias. Automated detection methods often need voxel-wise annotations for training. We propose a novel approach for automated lesion detection that can be trained on scans only annotated with a dot per lesion instead of a full segmentation. From the dot annotations and their corresponding intensity images we compute various distance maps (DMs), indicating the distance to a lesion based on spatial distance, intensity distance, or both. We train a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) to predict these DMs for unseen intensity images. The local optima in the predicted DMs are expected to correspond to lesion locations. We show the potential of this approach to detect enlarged perivascular spaces in white matter on a large brain MRI dataset with an independent test set of 1000 scans. Our method matches the intra-rater performance of the expert rater that was computed on an independent set. We compare the different types of distance maps, showing that incorporating intensity information in the distance maps used to train an FCN greatly improves performance.

AB - Localization of focal vascular lesions on brain MRI is an important component of research on the etiology of neurological disorders. However, manual annotation of lesions can be challenging, time-consuming and subject to observer bias. Automated detection methods often need voxel-wise annotations for training. We propose a novel approach for automated lesion detection that can be trained on scans only annotated with a dot per lesion instead of a full segmentation. From the dot annotations and their corresponding intensity images we compute various distance maps (DMs), indicating the distance to a lesion based on spatial distance, intensity distance, or both. We train a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) to predict these DMs for unseen intensity images. The local optima in the predicted DMs are expected to correspond to lesion locations. We show the potential of this approach to detect enlarged perivascular spaces in white matter on a large brain MRI dataset with an independent test set of 1000 scans. Our method matches the intra-rater performance of the expert rater that was computed on an independent set. We compare the different types of distance maps, showing that incorporating intensity information in the distance maps used to train an FCN greatly improves performance.

KW - Dot annotations

KW - Fully convolutional neural network

KW - Geodesic distance

KW - Lesion detection

KW - Perivascular spaces

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075694039&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-32251-9_26

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-32251-9_26

M3 - Article in proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:85075694039

SN - 9783030322502

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

SP - 234

EP - 242

BT - Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2019 - 22nd International Conference, Proceedings

A2 - Shen, Dinggang

A2 - Yap, Pew-Thian

A2 - Liu, Tianming

A2 - Peters, Terry M.

A2 - Khan, Ali

A2 - Staib, Lawrence H.

A2 - Essert, Caroline

A2 - Zhou, Sean

PB - Springer VS

T2 - 22nd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2019

Y2 - 13 October 2019 through 17 October 2019

ER -