2012 Summer Project Week:TimeSeriesMonitoringIntracranialBones

Key Investigators

• AZE Research and Development, Cambridge, MA: Karl Diedrich

Objective

• The goal of this project is to increase the performance (sensitivity and specificity) of detection of bone involvement in meningioma. Meningiomas are the most common form of intracranial tumor [1]. Meningiomas are either managed by watchful waiting or treated by resection and optional radiation therapy [2]. Bone involvement signals a more dangerous form of disease with increased death rates and recurrence after treatment warranting more aggressiveness treatment [2], [3]. Bone involvement is detected by radiographic evidence of hyperostosis, bone sclerosis or osteolytic lesions [2]. Watchful waiting involves repeated time series imaging of patients by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) following initial discovery often by computed tomography (CT).

• Learn to develop Slicer commandline extensions
• Learn to develop Slicer modules

Approach, Plan

• Segment the intracranial bones by thresholding the intensity by histogram and keeping the largest connected component
• Rigid register the time series bone tissue. The sparse data from the segmentation will be converted into a filled out distance map for gradient descent optimization using the mutual information cost function for intermodality CT MRI registration.

Progress

• Segmented part of intracranial bone by intensity threshold.
• Turned the bone into a distance map and registered bone on the distance map.

Delivery Mechanism

Distance map module.

• Slicer Module
• Extension -- commandline

References

1. J. Wiemels, M. Wrensch, and E. B. Claus, “Epidemiology and etiology of meningioma,” J. Neurooncol., vol. 99, no. 3, pp. 307–314, Sep. 2010.
2. D. Gabeau-Lacet, M. Aghi, R. A. Betensky, F. G. Barker, J. S. Loeffler, and D. N. Louis, “Bone Involvement Predicts Poor Outcome in Atypical Meningioma,” J Neurosurg, vol. 111, no. 3, pp. 464–471, Sep. 2009.
3. R. Graf, M. Plotkin, I. G. Steffen, R. Wurm, P. Wust, W. Brenner, V. Budach, and H. Badakhshi, “Magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, and 68Ga-DOTATOC positron emission tomography for imaging skull base meningiomas with infracranial extension treated with stereotactic radiotherapy--a case series,” Head Face Med, vol. 8, p. 1, 2012.