2008 Annual Scientific Report

Back to 2008_Progress_Report

Guidelines for preparation

• 2008_Progress_Report#Scientific Report Timeline - Main point is that May 15 is the date by which all sections below need to be completed. No extensions are possible.
• DBPs - If there is work outside of the roadmap projects that you would like to report, you are welcome to create a separate section for it under "Other".
• The outline for this report is similar to the 2007 report, which is provided here for reference: 2007_Annual_Scientific_Report.
• In preparing summaries for each of the 8 topics in this report, please leverage the detailed pages for projects provided here: NA-MIC_Internal_Collaborations.
• Publications will be mined from the SPL publications database. All core PIs need to ensure that all NA-MIC publications are in the publications database by May 15.

Introduction (Tannenbaum)

The National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NA-MIC) is now in its fourth year. This Center is comprised of a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, software engineers, and medical investigators who have come together to develop and apply computational tools for the analysis and visualization of medical imaging data. A further purpose of the Center is to provide infrastructure and environmental support for the development of computational algorithms and open source technologies, and to oversee the training and dissemination of these tools to the medical research community. The first driving biological projects (DBPs) three years for Center were inspired by schizophrenia research. In the fourth year new DBPs have been added. Three are centered around diseases of the brain: (a) brain lesion analysis in neuropschiatric systemic lupus erythematosus; (b) a study of cortical thickness for autism; and (c) stochastic tractography for VCFS. In an very new direction, we have added DBP on the prostate: brachytherapy needle positioning robot integration.

Clinical Roadmap Projects

Roadmap Project: Stochastic Tractography for VCFS (Kubicki)

Additional Information

Additional Information for this project is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

Roadmap Project: Brachytherapy Needle Positioning Robot Integration (Fichtinger)

Algorithm Component (Tannenbaum)

Currently we attack the segmentation of the prostate in two ways. The first way is a combination of Cellular Automata(CA also called Grow Cut) with Geodesic Active Contour(GAC) methods. While the second is using a ellipsoid to match the prostate in 3D image. The details are given below.

1. CA algorithm is used to give a rough segmentation which is fed into GAC for finer tuning. Both algorithm are implemented in 3D. A ITK-Cellular Automata filter, dealing with N-D data, has already been completed and submitted into the NA-MIC SandBox.

2. Prostate is usually modeled as an ellipsoid. We try using ellipsoid model, coupled with various local and global segmentation energy definition, to give an fully automatic segmentation.

Additional Information

Additional Information for this project is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

Roadmap Project: Brain Lesion Analysis in Neuropsychiatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (Bockholt)

Additional Information

Additional Information for this project is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

Roadmap Project: Cortical Thickness for Autism(Hazlett)

Additional Information

Additional Information for this project is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

Four Infrastructure Topics

Diffusion Image Analysis (Gerig)

Additional Information

Additional Information for this topic is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

Structural Analysis(Tannenbaum)

Progress

Under Structural Analysis, the main topics of research for NAMIC are structural segmentation, registration techniques and shape analysis. These topics are correlated and research in one often finds application in another. For example, shape analysis can yield useful priors for segmentation, or segmentation and registration can provide structural correspondences for use in shape analysis and so on.

An overview of selected progress highlights under these broad topics follows.

Key Investigators

	MIT: Kilian Pohl, Sandy Wells, Eric Grimson 
	UNC: Martin Styner, Ipek Oguz, Xavier Barbero 
	Utah: Ross Whitaker, Guido Gerig, Suyash Awate, Tolga Tasdizen, Tom Fletcher, Joshua Cates, Miriah Meyer 
	GaTech: Allen Tannenbaum, John Melonakos, Tauseef ur Rehman, Shawn Lankton, Yogesh Rathi, James Malcolm 
	Isomics: Steve Pieper 
	GE: Bill Lorensen, Jim Miller 
	Kitware: Luis Ibanez, Karthik Krishnan, 
	UCLA: Michael J. Pan, Jagadeeswaran Rajendiran 
	BWH: Sylvain Bouix, Motoaki Nakamura, Min-Seong Koo, Martha Shenton, Marc Niethammer, Jim Levitt 
	Dartmouth: Andrew Saykin

Additional Information

Additional Information for this topic is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

fMRI Analysis (Golland)

Additional Information

Additional Information for this topic is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

NA-MIC Kit Theme (Schroeder)

Additional Information

Additional Information for this topic is available here on the NA-MIC wiki.

Other Projects

Any Project(s) not covered by the 8 sections above

Appendix A Publications (Kapur)

These will be mined from the SPL publications database. All core PIs need to ensure that all NA-MIC publications are in the publications database by May 15.