DBP:Harvard:Software:Testing:EMABC Validation

Validating Slicer Module 'EMAtlasBrainClassifier'

Katharina Quintus, PNL

Introduction

1.1 Goals:

Studies performed by the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (PNL) rely on automatic segmentation of gray matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from brain MR images. We are interested in a segementation pipeline that (i) requires minimal human interaction, and is (ii) easy to maintain and control from a technical point of view. In the following the results of such a new method are compared to the results from our current segementation pipeline.

1.2. Current segmentation pipeline:

So far for every scanned volume involved in studies has been segmented into white matter, gray matter and CSF using the following four step segmentation pipeline:

1. Coregistration of T2 and structural volumes using the Slicer “AG” Module, which transforms and re-slices the T2 volume so that it lines up with the SPGR.
2. Intensity Normalization: Scaling the intensity of every scan to match its average intensity to a template in order to adjust for different intensity profiles resulting from different scanners used. This is done using the Normalization module in Slicer.
3. Atlas Registration: Warping a template atlas to the case being segmented which yields four probability atlases (one for every tissue class, one for background). Currently this is performed by a Python script written by Alexandre Guimond.
4. EM Segmentation: The expectation maximization procedure separates MR data into background, face, CSF, gray matter, and white matter. Up to now this is accomplished by a Tcl script written by Kilian Pohl.

1.3. New pipeline: The EMAtlasBrainClassifier module in Slicer:

The EMAtlasBrainClassifier module basically implements the same expectation maximization algorithm as the Tcl script used in the current PNL processing pipeline. However, this module performs all four processing steps with a single button press. The user has to define the structural volume and the corresponding T2 volume and decides if step one (coregistration) is needed or not. Furthermore the user can turn on/off the output of various intermediate results of the segmentation algorithm under ”Advanced Tab”. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the user interface of the EMAtlasBrainClassifier Module in Slicer.

Figure 1: The EMAtlasBrainClassifier Module user interface in Slicer

An important feature is the possibility to toggle multi threading. Segmentation results were found to be dependent on the number of CPUs. This is due to the parallel implementation of the segmentation algorithm. To guarantee comparable results between computers with different numbers of CPUs, multithreading will be turned off in our new processing pipeline.

1.4 Motivation for the new pipeline

The new segmentation strategy only requires one click to initiate the process compared to four processing steps required by the old processing pipeline. Furthermore multithreading can be toggled with the Slicer module. The open source nature of 3DSlicer allows for the continuous integration of new, state-of-the art processing algorithms as well as the constant improvement of already existing modules. To assure the correctness of the EMSegmentation module output after a 3DSlicer update, we run an automated testing process comparing current module output to an expected module output for certain test cases.

The test result is automatically submitted to a webpage using the dashboard technology developed by Kitware.

2. Validation

2.1 Test cases

Seventy-eight cases of the PNL database for which the segmentation had already been created using the current pipeline were selected. We aimed to cover all disease databases in our lab in order to compare segmentation performance for all different disease-specific brain physiologies.

The following cases were selected:

Database	Gender	Quantity
Chronic Schizophrenia	female	2