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Simon K. Warfield

Publications and source records attributed to Simon K. Warfield.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Scale-Aware 3D Deep Learning for Robust Brain Metastasis Detection in Multimodal MRI

Detecting brain metastases in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains challenging because lesions vary widely in size and appearance, with very small metastases occupying only a minute fraction of a three-dimensional input. We investigate whether combining different spatial fields of view (FOVs) improves lesion detection in multimodal MRI and present a scale-aware 3D deep-learning framework. The method uses independently trained $96^3$ and $64^3$ 3D U-Nets whose whole-volume probability maps are combined by weighted late fusion. This design allows us to study the effect of spatial context separately from image resolution and modality choice. On a 97-patient development cohort, cross-FOV fusion improved lesion-level precision and F1 while substantially reducing false positives relative to the individual models. A same-FOV ensemble control showed that these gains were not explained solely by averaging independently trained networks, supporting a contribution from complementary spatial context. An exploratory cross-FOV agreement filter reduced false positives but did not improve overall F1. These results support cross-FOV probability fusion as a simple and computationally practical strategy for improving the precision-false-positive trade-off in 3D brain-metastasis detection.

eess.IV

Impact of Synthetic Lesional MR Images in Automated Focal Cortical Dysplasia Detection in Low-Data Scenarios

Background and Purpose: Automated detection of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) requires large volumes of voxelwise lesion-delineated MRI data, which are difficult to acquire. This study aims to generate synthetic MRI data exhibiting FCD, assess their realism, and evaluate their impact on automated FCD detection, particularly in reducing the need for manual annotations. Methods: T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted Fluid-Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) MRI scans from 131 FCD patients and 90 healthy controls from multiple (3) sites were retrospectively studied. Synthetic MRIs were generated by conditioning a generative network on binary FCD masks. Two neuroradiologists identified real images from a random set of 14 real and 14 synthetic scans. Three nnU-Net models were trained to detect FCD using: (i) real-only (35 FCD / 35 controls), (ii) real (35 FCD / 35 controls) plus synthetic augmentation, and (iii) expanded real data (70 FCD / 70 controls). Results: Experts showed limited ability to distinguish real from synthetic images, with classification accuracy of 60% for T1w and 70% for FLAIR (inter-rater agreement kappa = 0.86). Augmenting automated FCD detection with synthetic data increased sensitivity by 8.14% (p = 0.12) and improved model confidence at true lesion sites (0.83 +/- 0.11 to 0.89 +/- 0.12; p = 0.02). The expanded real-data model further improved sensitivity to 73.8% (p < 0.001) and confidence to 0.90 +/- 0.14 (p = 0.01). Conclusion: Conditional generative networks can generate realistic synthetic FCD-MRIs, reducing labeled data needs by approximately 20% while maintaining equivalent sensitivity. Equivalent amounts of real data, when available, remain more effective than synthetic augmentation.

eess.IV

An MRI Atlas of the Human Fetal Brain: Reference and Segmentation Tools for Fetal Brain MRI Analysis

Characterizing in-utero brain development is essential for understanding typical and atypical neurodevelopment. Building on prior spatiotemporal fetal brain MRI atlases, we present the CRL-2025 fetal brain atlas, a spatiotemporal (4D) atlas of the developing fetal brain between 21 and 37 gestational weeks. This atlas is constructed from MRI scans of 159 fetuses with typically developing brains using a diffeomorphic deformable registration framework integrated with kernel regression on age. CRL-2025 uniquely includes detailed tissue segmentations, transient white matter compartments, and parcellation into 126 anatomical regions. It offers significantly enhanced anatomical details over the CRL-2017 atlas and is presented along with a re-release of the CRL diffusion MRI atlas featuring newly created tissue segmentation and labels. We release de-identified, processed subject-level fetal MRI datasets used to generate CRL-2025, providing input-output transparency and reproducibility. We also provide FetalSEG, a deep learning-based multiclass segmentation tool to facilitate automatic fetal brain MRI segmentation. The CRL-2025 atlas and its tools enable scalable fetal brain MRI segmentation, analysis, and neurodevelopmental research for the broader community.

q-bio.QM

Diffusion MRI with Machine Learning

\hspace{2mm} Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) of the brain offers unique capabilities including noninvasive probing of tissue microstructure and structural connectivity. It is widely used for clinical assessment of disease and injury, and for neuroscience research. Analyzing the dMRI data to extract useful information for medical and scientific purposes can be challenging. The dMRI measurements may suffer from strong noise and artifacts, and may exhibit high inter-session and inter-scanner variability in the data, as well as inter-subject heterogeneity in brain structure. Moreover, the relationship between measurements and the phenomena of interest can be highly complex. Recent years have witnessed increasing use of machine learning methods for dMRI analysis. This manuscript aims to assess these efforts, with a focus on methods that have addressed data preprocessing and harmonization, microstructure mapping, tractography, and white matter tract analysis. We study the main findings, strengths, and weaknesses of the existing methods and suggest topics for future research. We find that machine learning may be exceptionally suited to tackle some of the difficult tasks in dMRI analysis. However, for this to happen, several shortcomings of existing methods and critical unresolved issues need to be addressed. There is a pressing need to improve evaluation practices, to increase the availability of rich training datasets and validation benchmarks, as well as model generalizability, reliability, and explainability concerns.

eess.IV

MRI Super-Resolution with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey

High-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for many clinical and research applications. However, achieving it remains costly and constrained by technical trade-offs and experimental limitations. Super-resolution (SR) presents a promising computational approach to overcome these challenges by generating HR images from more affordable low-resolution (LR) scans, potentially improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency without requiring additional hardware. This survey reviews recent advances in MRI SR techniques, with a focus on deep learning (DL) approaches. It examines DL-based MRI SR methods from the perspectives of computer vision, computational imaging, inverse problems, and MR physics, covering theoretical foundations, architectural designs, learning strategies, benchmark datasets, and performance metrics. We propose a systematic taxonomy to categorize these methods and present an in-depth study of both established and emerging SR techniques applicable to MRI, considering unique challenges in clinical and research contexts. We also highlight open challenges and directions that the community needs to address. Additionally, we provide a collection of essential open-access resources, tools, and tutorials, available on our GitHub: https://github.com/mkhateri/Awesome-MRI-Super-Resolution. IEEE keywords: MRI, Super-Resolution, Deep Learning, Computational Imaging, Inverse Problem, Survey.

eess.IV

Rapid, High-resolution and Distortion-free $R_{2}^{*}$ Mapping of Fetal Brain using Multi-echo Radial FLASH and Model-based Reconstruction

Purpose: To develop a rapid, high-resolution and distortion-free technique for simultaneous water-fat separation, $R_{2}^{*}$ and $B_{0}$ mapping of the fetal brain at 3T. Methods: A 2D multi-echo radial FLASH sequence with blip gradients is adapted for data acquisition during maternal free breathing. A calibrationless model-based reconstruction with sparsity constraints is developed to jointly estimate water, fat, $R_{2}^{*}$ and $B_{0}$ field maps directly from k-space. This approach was validated and compared to reference methods using numerical and NIST phantoms and data from nine fetuses between 26 and 36 weeks of gestation age. Results: Both numerical and experimental phantom studies confirm good accuracy and precision. In fetal studies, model-based reconstruction yields quantitative $R_{2}^{*}$ values in close agreement with those from a parallel imaging compressed sensing (PICS) technique using Graph Cut (intra-class correlation coefficient [ICC] = 0.9601), while providing enhanced image detail. Repeated scans confirm good reproducibility (ICC = 0.9213). Compared to multi-echo EPI, the proposed radial technique produces higher-resolution (1.1 $\times$ 1.1 $\times$ 3 mm$^{3}$ vs. 2-3 $\times$ 2-3 $\times$ 3 mm$^{3}$) $R_{2}^{*}$ maps with reduced distortion. Despite of differences in motion, resolution and distortion, $R_{2}^{*}$ values are comparable between the two acquisition strategies (ICC = 0.8049). Additionally, the proposed approach enables synthesis of high-resolution and distortion-free $R_{2}^{*}$-weighted images. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the feasibility of using multi-echo radial FLASH combined with calibrationless model-based reconstruction for motion-robust, distortion-free $R_{2}^{*}$ mapping of the fetal brain at 3T, achieving a nominal resolution of $1.1 \times 1.1 \times 3$ mm$^{3}$ within 2 seconds per slice.

physics.med-ph

FetDTIAlign: A Deep Learning Framework for Affine and Deformable Registration of Fetal Brain dMRI

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) provides unique insights into fetal brain microstructure in utero. Longitudinal and cross-sectional fetal dMRI studies can reveal crucial neurodevelopmental changes but require precise spatial alignment across scans and subjects. This is challenging due to low data quality, rapid brain development, and limited anatomical landmarks. Existing registration methods, designed for high-quality adult data, struggle with these complexities. To address this, we introduce FetDTIAlign, a deep learning approach for fetal brain dMRI registration, enabling accurate affine and deformable alignment. FetDTIAlign features a dual-encoder architecture and iterative feature-based inference, reducing the impact of noise and low resolution. It optimizes network configurations and domain-specific features at each registration stage, enhancing both robustness and accuracy. We validated FetDTIAlign on data from 23 to 36 weeks gestation, covering 60 white matter tracts. It consistently outperformed two classical optimization-based methods and a deep learning pipeline, achieving superior anatomical correspondence. Further validation on external data from the Developing Human Connectome Project confirmed its generalizability across acquisition protocols. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of deep learning for fetal brain dMRI registration, providing a more accurate and reliable alternative to classical techniques. By enabling precise cross-subject and tract-specific analyses, FetDTIAlign supports new discoveries in early brain development.

eess.IV

IVIM-Morph: Motion-compensated quantitative Intra-voxel Incoherent Motion (IVIM) analysis for functional fetal lung maturity assessment from diffusion-weighted MRI data

Quantitative analysis of pseudo-diffusion in diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) data shows potential for assessing fetal lung maturation and generating valuable imaging biomarkers. Yet, the clinical utility of DWI data is hindered by unavoidable fetal motion during acquisition. We present IVIM-morph, a self-supervised deep neural network model for motion-corrected quantitative analysis of DWI data using the Intra-voxel Incoherent Motion (IVIM) model. IVIM-morph combines two sub-networks, a registration sub-network, and an IVIM model fitting sub-network, enabling simultaneous estimation of IVIM model parameters and motion. To promote physically plausible image registration, we introduce a biophysically informed loss function that effectively balances registration and model-fitting quality. We validated the efficacy of IVIM-morph by establishing a correlation between the predicted IVIM model parameters of the lung and gestational age (GA) using fetal DWI data of 39 subjects. IVIM-morph exhibited a notably improved correlation with gestational age (GA) when performing in-vivo quantitative analysis of fetal lung DWI data during the canalicular phase. IVIM-morph shows potential in developing valuable biomarkers for non-invasive assessment of fetal lung maturity with DWI data. Moreover, its adaptability opens the door to potential applications in other clinical contexts where motion compensation is essential for quantitative DWI analysis. The IVIM-morph code is readily available at: https://github.com/TechnionComputationalMRILab/qDWI-Morph.

eess.IV

Detailed delineation of the fetal brain in diffusion MRI via multi-task learning

Diffusion-weighted MRI is increasingly used to study the normal and abnormal development of fetal brain in-utero. Recent studies have shown that dMRI can offer invaluable insights into the neurodevelopmental processes in the fetal stage. However, because of the low data quality and rapid brain development, reliable analysis of fetal dMRI data requires dedicated computational methods that are currently unavailable. The lack of automated methods for fast, accurate, and reproducible data analysis has seriously limited our ability to tap the potential of fetal brain dMRI for medical and scientific applications. In this work, we developed and validated a unified computational framework to (1) segment the brain tissue into white matter, cortical/subcortical gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid, (2) segment 31 distinct white matter tracts, and (3) parcellate the brain's cortex and delineate the deep gray nuclei and white matter structures into 96 anatomically meaningful regions. We utilized a set of manual, semi-automatic, and automatic approaches to annotate 97 fetal brains. Using these labels, we developed and validated a multi-task deep learning method to perform the three computations. Our evaluations show that the new method can accurately carry out all three tasks, achieving a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.865 on tissue segmentation, 0.825 on white matter tract segmentation, and 0.819 on parcellation. The proposed method can greatly advance the field of fetal neuroimaging as it can lead to substantial improvements in fetal brain tractography, tract-specific analysis, and structural connectivity assessment.

eess.IV

Diffusion Tensor Estimation with Uncertainty Calibration

It is highly desirable to know how uncertain a model's predictions are, especially for models that are complex and hard to understand as in deep learning. Although there has been a growing interest in using deep learning methods in diffusion-weighted MRI, prior works have not addressed the issue of model uncertainty. Here, we propose a deep learning method to estimate the diffusion tensor and compute the estimation uncertainty. Data-dependent uncertainty is computed directly by the network and learned via loss attenuation. Model uncertainty is computed using Monte Carlo dropout. We also propose a new method for evaluating the quality of predicted uncertainties. We compare the new method with the standard least-squares tensor estimation and bootstrap-based uncertainty computation techniques. Our experiments show that when the number of measurements is small the deep learning method is more accurate and its uncertainty predictions are better calibrated than the standard methods. We show that the estimation uncertainties computed by the new method can highlight the model's biases, detect domain shift, and reflect the strength of noise in the measurements. Our study shows the importance and practical value of modeling prediction uncertainties in deep learning-based diffusion MRI analysis.

cs.LG

Streamline tractography of the fetal brain in utero with machine learning

Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is the only non-invasive tool for studying white matter tracts and structural connectivity of the brain. These assessments rely heavily on tractography techniques, which reconstruct virtual streamlines representing white matter fibers. Much effort has been devoted to improving tractography methodology for adult brains, while tractography of the fetal brain has been largely neglected. Fetal tractography faces unique difficulties due to low dMRI signal quality, immature and rapidly developing brain structures, and paucity of reference data. This work presents the first machine learning model for fetal tractography. The model input consists of five sources of information: (1) Fiber orientation, inferred from a diffusion tensor fit to the dMRI signal; (2) Directions of recent propagation steps; (3) Global spatial information, encoded as distances to keypoints in the brain cortex; (4) Tissue segmentation information; and (5) Prior information about the expected local fiber orientations supplied with an atlas. In order to mitigate the local tensor estimation error, a large spatial context around the current point in the diffusion tensor image is encoded using convolutional and attention neural network modules. Moreover, the diffusion tensor information at a hypothetical next point is included in the model input. Filtering rules based on anatomically constrained tractography are applied to prune implausible streamlines. We trained the model on manually-refined whole-brain fetal tractograms and validated the trained model on an independent set of 11 test scans with gestational ages between 23 and 36 weeks. Results show that our proposed method achieves superior performance across all evaluated tracts. The new method can significantly advance the capabilities of dMRI for studying normal and abnormal brain development in utero.

cs.CV

White matter tract crossing and bottleneck regions in the fetal brain

There is a growing interest in using diffusion MRI to study the white matter tracts and structural connectivity of the fetal brain. Recent progress in data acquisition and processing suggests that this imaging modality has a unique role in elucidating the normal and abnormal patterns of neurodevelopment in utero. However, there have been no efforts to quantify the prevalence of crossing tracts and bottleneck regions, important issues that have been extensively researched for adult brains. In this work, we determined the brain regions with crossing tracts and bottlenecks between 23 and 36 gestational weeks. We performed probabilistic tractography on 59 fetal brain scans and extracted a set of 51 distinct white tracts, which we grouped into 10 major tract bundle groups. We analyzed the results to determine the patterns of tract crossings and bottlenecks. Our results showed that 20-25% of the white matter voxels included two or three crossing tracts. Bottlenecks were more prevalent. Between 75-80% of the voxels were characterized as bottlenecks, with more than 40% of the voxels involving four or more tracts. The results of this study highlight the challenge of fetal brain tractography and structural connectivity assessment and call for innovative image acquisition and analysis methods to mitigate these problems.

q-bio.NC

A self-attention model for robust rigid slice-to-volume registration of functional MRI

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is vital in neuroscience, enabling investigations into brain disorders, treatment monitoring, and brain function mapping. However, head motion during fMRI scans, occurring between shots of slice acquisition, can result in distortion, biased analyses, and increased costs due to the need for scan repetitions. Therefore, retrospective slice-level motion correction through slice-to-volume registration (SVR) is crucial. Previous studies have utilized deep learning (DL) based models to address the SVR task; however, they overlooked the uncertainty stemming from the input stack of slices and did not assign weighting or scoring to each slice. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end SVR model for aligning 2D fMRI slices with a 3D reference volume, incorporating a self-attention mechanism to enhance robustness against input data variations and uncertainties. It utilizes independent slice and volume encoders and a self-attention module to assign pixel-wise scores for each slice. We conducted evaluation experiments on 200 images involving synthetic rigid motion generated from 27 subjects belonging to the test set, from the publicly available Healthy Brain Network (HBN) dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in terms of alignment accuracy compared to state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods (Euclidean distance of $0.93$ [mm] vs. $1.86$ [mm]). Furthermore, our approach exhibits significantly faster registration speed compared to conventional iterative methods ($0.096$ sec. vs. $1.17$ sec.). Our end-to-end SVR model facilitates real-time head motion tracking during fMRI acquisition, ensuring reliability and robustness against uncertainties in inputs. source code, which includes the training and evaluations, will be available soon.

cs.CV

Anatomically Constrained Tractography of the Fetal Brain

Diffusion-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) is increasingly used to study the fetal brain in utero. An important computation enabled by dMRI is streamline tractography, which has unique applications such as tract-specific analysis of the brain white matter and structural connectivity assessment. However, due to the low fetal dMRI data quality and the challenging nature of tractography, existing methods tend to produce highly inaccurate results. They generate many false streamlines while failing to reconstruct streamlines that constitute the major white matter tracts. In this paper, we advocate for anatomically constrained tractography based on an accurate segmentation of the fetal brain tissue directly in the dMRI space. We develop a deep learning method to compute the segmentation automatically. Experiments on independent test data show that this method can accurately segment the fetal brain tissue and drastically improve tractography results. It enables the reconstruction of highly curved tracts such as optic radiations. Importantly, our method infers the tissue segmentation and streamline propagation direction from a diffusion tensor fit to the dMRI data, making it applicable to routine fetal dMRI scans. The proposed method can lead to significant improvements in the accuracy and reproducibility of quantitative assessment of the fetal brain with dMRI.

cs.CV

3D Brainformer: 3D Fusion Transformer for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critically important for brain mapping in both scientific research and clinical studies. Precise segmentation of brain tumors facilitates clinical diagnosis, evaluations, and surgical planning. Deep learning has recently emerged to improve brain tumor segmentation and achieved impressive results. Convolutional architectures are widely used to implement those neural networks. By the nature of limited receptive fields, however, those architectures are subject to representing long-range spatial dependencies of the voxel intensities in MRI images. Transformers have been leveraged recently to address the above limitations of convolutional networks. Unfortunately, the majority of current Transformers-based methods in segmentation are performed with 2D MRI slices, instead of 3D volumes. Moreover, it is difficult to incorporate the structures between layers because each head is calculated independently in the Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism (MHSA). In this work, we proposed a 3D Transformer-based segmentation approach. We developed a Fusion-Head Self-Attention mechanism (FHSA) to combine each attention head through attention logic and weight mapping, for the exploration of the long-range spatial dependencies in 3D MRI images. We implemented a plug-and-play self-attention module, named the Infinite Deformable Fusion Transformer Module (IDFTM), to extract features on any deformable feature maps. We applied our approach to the task of brain tumor segmentation, and assessed it on the public BRATS datasets. The experimental results demonstrated that our proposed approach achieved superior performance, in comparison to several state-of-the-art segmentation methods.

eess.IV

CORPS: Cost-free Rigorous Pseudo-labeling based on Similarity-ranking for Brain MRI Segmentation

Segmentation of brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) is crucial for the analysis of the human brain and diagnosis of various brain disorders. The drawbacks of time-consuming and error-prone manual delineation procedures are aimed to be alleviated by atlas-based and supervised machine learning methods where the former methods are computationally intense and the latter methods lack a sufficiently large number of labeled data. With this motivation, we propose CORPS, a semi-supervised segmentation framework built upon a novel atlas-based pseudo-labeling method and a 3D deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) for 3D brain MRI segmentation. In this work, we propose to generate expert-level pseudo-labels for unlabeled set of images in an order based on a local intensity-based similarity score to existing labeled set of images and using a novel atlas-based label fusion method. Then, we propose to train a 3D DCNN on the combination of expert and pseudo labeled images for binary segmentation of each anatomical structure. The binary segmentation approach is proposed to avoid the poor performance of multi-class segmentation methods on limited and imbalanced data. This also allows to employ a lightweight and efficient 3D DCNN in terms of the number of filters and reserve memory resources for training the binary networks on full-scale and full-resolution 3D MRI volumes instead of 2D/3D patches or 2D slices. Thus, the proposed framework can encapsulate the spatial contiguity in each dimension and enhance context-awareness. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over the baseline method both qualitatively and quantitatively without additional labeling cost for manual labeling.

cs.CV

Critical Assessment of Transfer Learning for Medical Image Segmentation with Fully Convolutional Neural Networks

Transfer learning is widely used for training machine learning models. Here, we study the role of transfer learning for training fully convolutional networks (FCNs) for medical image segmentation. Our experiments show that although transfer learning reduces the training time on the target task, the improvement in segmentation accuracy is highly task/data-dependent. Larger improvements in accuracy are observed when the segmentation task is more challenging and the target training data is smaller. We observe that convolutional filters of an FCN change little during training for medical image segmentation, and still look random at convergence. We further show that quite accurate FCNs can be built by freezing the encoder section of the network at random values and only training the decoder section. At least for medical image segmentation, this finding challenges the common belief that the encoder section needs to learn data/task-specific representations. We examine the evolution of FCN representations to gain a better insight into the effects of transfer learning on the training dynamics. Our analysis shows that although FCNs trained via transfer learning learn different representations than FCNs trained with random initialization, the variability among FCNs trained via transfer learning can be as high as that among FCNs trained with random initialization. Moreover, feature reuse is not restricted to the early encoder layers; rather, it can be more significant in deeper layers. These findings offer new insights and suggest alternative ways of training FCNs for medical image segmentation.

cs.CV

Patient-specific solution of the electrocorticography forward problem in deforming brain

Invasive intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) or electrocorticography (ECoG) measures electric potential directly on the surface of the brain and can be used to inform treatment planning for epilepsy surgery. Combined with numerical modeling they can further improve accuracy of epilepsy surgery planning. Accurate solution of the iEEG or ECoG forward problem, which is a crucial prerequisite for solving the inverse problem in epilepsy seizure onset zone localization, requires accurate representation of the patient's brain geometry and tissue electrical conductivity after implantation of electrodes. However, implantation of subdural grid electrodes causes the brain to deform, which invalidates preoperatively acquired image data. Moreover, postoperative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is incompatible with implanted electrodes and computed tomography (CT) has insufficient range of soft tissue contrast, which precludes both MRI and CT from being used to obtain the deformed postoperative geometry. In this paper, we present a biomechanics-based image warping procedure using preoperative MRI for tissue classification and postoperative CT for locating implanted electrodes to perform non-rigid registration of the preoperative image data to the postoperative configuration. We solve the iEEG forward problem on the predicted postoperative geometry using the finite element method (FEM) which accounts for patient-specific inhomogeneity and anisotropy of tissue conductivity. Results for the simulation of a current source in the brain show large differences in electric potential predicted by the models based on the original images and the deformed images corresponding to the brain geometry deformed by placement of invasive electrodes. Computation of the lead field matrix (useful for solution of the iEEG inverse problem) also showed significant differences between the different models.

physics.med-ph