2013 Summer Project Week:Epilepsy Surgery

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  Projects List

Key Investigators

• USP - Luiz Murta

Objective

This project will investigate the presence and location of the epileptogenic focus in temporal lobe by analyzing patterns of texture in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) after segmentation using anisotropic diffusion filters anomalous and geodesic active contour.

The Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) with hippocampal sclerosis affects other mesial temporal lobe structures, showing the change in signal intensity of white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in patients with TLE.

Such abnormalities of signal intensity changes in the temporal lobes, or loss of marking between WM and GM are referred as blurring in literature.

TLE is the most common type of refractory epilepsy in adults, and thus strong candidate to surgery.

Purpose

To provide a better quality of life for those with TLE, a surgical procedure is usually proposed for extracting the brain region that is the focus of epilepsy.

This project aims to implment a semi-automated method capable of locating lesions, that is difficult to be detected by visual inspection, is built to help experts identify tissues presenting blurring in temporal lobes.

The proposed software tool was developed in C + +, using three toolkits to support: VTK, ITK and QT.

To provide segmentation of the temporal lobes, we used the Geodesic Active Contour method combined with the anomalous anisotropic diffusion filter.

Progress

Examples:

Normal MRI at mesial temporal lobe

MRI containing blurring phenomena on right side as indicated by the yellow arrow

References

• Shaker, M. & Soltanian-Zadeh, H., 2008. Voxel-Based Morphometric Study of Brain Regions from Magnetic Resonance Images in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. Image Analysis and Interpretation, 2008. SSIAI 2008. IEEE Southwest Symposium on, 209-212.