Search

Purpose: To identify the impact of reconstruction algorithms on CT radiomic features of pulmonary tumors and to reveal and compare the intra- and inter-reader and inter-reconstruction algorithm variability of each feature. Methods: Forty-two patients (M:F = 19:23; mean age, 60.43±10.56 years) with 42 pulmonary tumors (22.56±8.51mm) underwent contrast-enhanced CT scans, which were reconstructed with filtered back projection and commercial iterative reconstruction algorithm (level 3 and 5). Two readers independently segmented the whole tumor volume. Fifteen radiomic features were extracted and compared among reconstruction algorithms. Intra- and inter-reader variability and inter-reconstruction algorithm variability were calculated using coefficients of variation (CVs) and then compared. Results: Among the 15 features, 5 first-order tumor intensity features and 4 gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM)-based features showed significant differences (p<0.05) among reconstruction algorithms. As for the variability, effective diameter, sphericity, entropy, and GLCM entropy were the most robust features (CV≤5%). Inter-reader variability was larger than intra-reader or inter-reconstruction algorithm variability in 9 features. However, for entropy, homogeneity, and 4 GLCM-based features, inter-reconstruction algorithm variability was significantly greater than inter-reader variability (p<0.013). Conclusions: Most of the radiomic features were significantly affected by the reconstruction algorithms. Inter-reconstruction algorithm variability was greater than inter-reader variability for entropy, homogeneity, and GLCM-based features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an automatic algorithm for the reconstruction of patient-specific cardiac mesh models with 1-to-1 vertex correspondence. In this framework, a series of 3D meshes depicting the endocardial surface of the heart at each time step is constructed, based on a set of border delineated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of the whole cardiac cycle. The key contribution in this work involves a novel reconstruction technique to generate a 4D (i.e., spatial–temporal) model of the heart with 1-to-1 vertex mapping throughout the time frames. The reconstructed 3D model from the first time step is used as a base template model and then deformed to fit the segmented contours from the subsequent time steps. A method to determine a tree-based connectivity relationship is proposed to ensure robust mapping during mesh deformation. The novel feature is the ability to handle intra- and inter-frame 2D topology changes of the contours, which manifests as a series of merging and splitting of contours when the images are viewed either in a spatial or temporal sequence. Our algorithm has been tested on five acquisitions of cardiac MRI and can successfully reconstruct the full 4D heart model in around 30 minutes per subject. The generated 4D heart model conforms very well with the input segmented contours and the mesh element shape is of reasonably good quality. The work is important in the support of downstream computational simulation activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High quality segmentation of diffusion tensor images (DTI) is of key interest in biomedical research and clinical application. In previous studies, most efforts have been made to construct predefined metrics for different DTI segmentation tasks. These methods require adequate prior knowledge and tuning parameters. To overcome these disadvantages, we proposed to automatically learn an adaptive distance metric by a graph based semi-supervised learning model for DTI segmentation. An original discriminative distance vector was first formulated by combining both geometry and orientation distances derived from diffusion tensors. The kernel metric over the original distance and labels of all voxels were then simultaneously optimized in a graph based semi-supervised learning approach. Finally, the optimization task was efficiently solved with an iterative gradient descent method to achieve the optimal solution. With our approach, an adaptive distance metric could be available for each specific segmentation task. Experiments on synthetic and real brain DTI datasets were performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed distance metric learning approach. The performance of our approach was compared with three classical metrics in the graph based semi-supervised learning framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]