No Arabic abstract
Understanding the dynamics of brain tumor progression is essential for optimal treatment planning. Cast in a mathematical formulation, it is typically viewed as evaluation of a system of partial differential equations, wherein the physiological processes that govern the growth of the tumor are considered. To personalize the model, i.e. find a relevant set of parameters, with respect to the tumor dynamics of a particular patient, the model is informed from empirical data, e.g., medical images obtained from diagnostic modalities, such as magnetic-resonance imaging. Existing model-observation coupling schemes require a large number of forward integrations of the biophysical model and rely on simplifying assumption on the functional form, linking the output of the model with the image information. In this work, we propose a learning-based technique for the estimation of tumor growth model parameters from medical scans. The technique allows for explicit evaluation of the posterior distribution of the parameters by sequentially training a mixture-density network, relaxing the constraint on the functional form and reducing the number of samples necessary to propagate through the forward model for the estimation. We test the method on synthetic and real scans of rats injected with brain tumors to calibrate the model and to predict tumor progression.
We present a 3D fully-automatic method for the calibration of partial differential equation (PDE) models of glioblastoma (GBM) growth with mass effect, the deformation of brain tissue due to the tumor. We quantify the mass effect, tumor proliferation, tumor migration, and the localized tumor initial condition from a single multiparameteric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (mpMRI) patient scan. The PDE is a reaction-advection-diffusion partial differential equation coupled with linear elasticity equations to capture mass effect. The single-scan calibration model is notoriously difficult because the precancerous (healthy) brain anatomy is unknown. To solve this inherently ill-posed and ill-conditioned optimization problem, we introduce a novel inversion scheme that uses multiple brain atlases as proxies for the healthy precancer patient brain resulting in robust and reliable parameter estimation. We apply our method on both synthetic and clinical datasets representative of the heterogeneous spatial landscape typically observed in glioblastomas to demonstrate the validity and performance of our methods. In the synthetic data, we report calibration errors (due to the ill-posedness and our solution scheme) in the 10%-20% range. In the clinical data, we report good quantitative agreement with the observed tumor and qualitative agreement with the mass effect (for which we do not have a ground truth). Our method uses a minimal set of parameters and provides both global and local quantitative measures of tumor infiltration and mass effect.
A significant challenge in Glioblastoma (GBM) management is identifying pseudo-progression (PsP), a benign radiation-induced effect, from tumor recurrence, on routine imaging following conventional treatment. Previous studies have linked tumor lobar presence and laterality to GBM outcomes, suggesting that disease etiology and progression in GBM may be impacted by tumor location. Hence, in this feasibility study, we seek to investigate the following question: Can tumor location on treatment-naive MRI provide early cues regarding likelihood of a patient developing pseudo-progression versus tumor recurrence? In this study, 74 pre-treatment Glioblastoma MRI scans with PsP (33) and tumor recurrence (41) were analyzed. First, enhancing lesion on Gd-T1w MRI and peri-lesional hyperintensities on T2w/FLAIR were segmented by experts and then registered to a brain atlas. Using patients from the two phenotypes, we construct two atlases by quantifying frequency of occurrence of enhancing lesion and peri-lesion hyperintensities, by averaging voxel intensities across the population. Analysis of differential involvement was then performed to compute voxel-wise significant differences (p-value<0.05) across the atlases. Statistically significant clusters were finally mapped to a structural atlas to provide anatomic localization of their location. Our results demonstrate that patients with tumor recurrence showed prominence of their initial tumor in the parietal lobe, while patients with PsP showed a multi-focal distribution of the initial tumor in the frontal and temporal lobes, insula, and putamen. These preliminary results suggest that lateralization of pre-treatment lesions towards certain anatomical areas of the brain may allow to provide early cues regarding assessing likelihood of occurrence of pseudo-progression from tumor recurrence on MRI scans.
Myelination plays an important role in the neurological development of infant brain and MRI can visualize the myelination extension as T1 high and T2 low signal intensity at white matter. We tried to construct a convolutional neural network machine learning model to estimate the myelination. Eight layers CNN architecture was constructed to estimate the subjects age with T1 and T2 weighted image at 5 levels associated with myelin maturation in 119 subjects up to 24 months. CNN model learned with all age dataset revealed a strong correlation between the estimated age and the corrected age and the coefficient of correlation, root mean square error and mean absolute error was 0. 81, 3. 40 and 2. 28. Moreover, the adaptation of ensemble learning models with two datasets 0 to 16 months and 8 to 24 months improved that to 0. 93, 2. 12 and 1. 34. Deep learning can be adaptable to myelination estimation in infant brain.
Background:Cognitive assessments represent the most common clinical routine for the diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease (AD). Given a large number of cognitive assessment tools and time-limited office visits, it is important to determine a proper set of cognitive tests for different subjects. Most current studies create guidelines of cognitive test selection for a targeted population, but they are not customized for each individual subject. In this manuscript, we develop a machine learning paradigm enabling personalized cognitive assessments prioritization. Method: We adapt a newly developed learning-to-rank approach PLTR to implement our paradigm. This method learns the latent scoring function that pushes the most effective cognitive assessments onto the top of the prioritization list. We also extend PLTR to better separate the most effective cognitive assessments and the less effective ones. Results: Our empirical study on the ADNI data shows that the proposed paradigm outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on identifying and prioritizing individual-specific cognitive biomarkers. We conduct experiments in cross validation and level-out validation settings. In the two settings, our paradigm significantly outperforms the best baselines with improvement as much as 22.1% and 19.7%, respectively, on prioritizing cognitive features. Conclusions: The proposed paradigm achieves superior performance on prioritizing cognitive biomarkers. The cognitive biomarkers prioritized on top have great potentials to facilitate personalized diagnosis, disease subtyping, and ultimately precision medicine in AD.
With growing emphasis on personalized cancer-therapies,radiogenomics has shown promise in identifying target tumor mutational status on routine imaging (i.e. MRI) scans. These approaches fall into 2 categories: (1) deep-learning/radiomics (context-based), using image features from the entire tumor to identify the gene mutation status, or (2) atlas (spatial)-based to obtain likelihood of gene mutation status based on population statistics. While many genes (i.e. EGFR, MGMT) are spatially variant, a significant challenge in reliable assessment of gene mutation status on imaging has been the lack of available co-localized ground truth for training the models. We present Spatial-And-Context aware (SpACe) virtual biopsy maps that incorporate context-features from co-localized biopsy site along with spatial-priors from population atlases, within a Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression model, to obtain a per-voxel probability of the presence of a mutation status (M+ vs M-). We then use probabilistic pair-wise Markov model to improve the voxel-wise prediction probability. We evaluate the efficacy of SpACe maps on MRI scans with co-localized ground truth obtained from corresponding biopsy, to predict the mutation status of 2 driver genes in Glioblastoma: (1) EGFR (n=91), and (2) MGMT (n=81). When compared against deep-learning (DL) and radiomic models, SpACe maps obtained training and testing accuracies of 90% (n=71) and 90.48% (n=21) in identifying EGFR amplification status,compared to 80% and 71.4% via radiomics, and 74.28% and 65.5% via DL. For MGMT status, training and testing accuracies using SpACe were 88.3% (n=61) and 71.5% (n=20), compared to 52.4% and 66.7% using radiomics,and 79.3% and 68.4% using DL. Following validation,SpACe maps could provide surgical navigation to improve localization of sampling sites for targeting of specific driver genes in cancer.