Large scale medical image search technology - a proof of concept

大规模医学图像搜索技术——概念验证

• 批准号: 710227
• 金额: $ 12.74万
• 依托单位: MIRADA MEDICAL LIMITED
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: GRD Proof of Concept
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2012 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=710227
• 关键词: Large; scale; medical; image; search

Radiotherapy is a key method for treating cancer in which high energy radiation is directed at a tumour to disrupt DNA replication and thereby destroy the tumour. However in the process, it is inevitable that surrounding healthy tissue is also irradiated. It is therefore necessary to plan any therapy to maximise the tumour dose while minimising the dose to the healthy tissue.In this process, known as RT planning, teams of clinical experts spend a great deal of time developing a treatment plan prior to its administration. This process is very time consuming and can typically take some tens of hours, leading to high costs and limited throughput for the clinic.A major step in the planning process is the delineation of the tumour and surrounding healthy organs in a medical image scan of the patient, a task known as contouring. The resultant delineations, called RTstructures, are subsequently used to estimate the delivered dose and optimise the treatment plan. Typically, tumour and organ delineation is a laborous manual process.An image processing technique known as atlas-based contouring has been shown to be effective in speeding up this step. Here, expert delineations of healthy organs on an example scan, known as an atlas, are warped automatically onto the scan of the patient. However, it has been found that this method is effective only in cases where the anatomy of the patient is similar in appearance to the atlas.The aim of this proof-of-concept project is to make atlas-based contouring work accurately for most if not all patients. We will do this by developing innovative technology that can build and rapidly search large-scale databases of atlases containing thousands of example delineations representing the wide variability in human anatomy. In a process analogous to Web search of keywords, when applied to a new patient, the system will first retrieve the best matching case or cases from the database and use only those for the atlas-based contouring process.

放射疗法是治疗癌症的关键方法，其中高能辐射指向肿瘤以破坏DNA复制，从而破坏肿瘤。然而，在这个过程中，周围的健康组织也不可避免地受到辐射。因此，有必要对任何治疗进行规划，以最大限度地提高肿瘤剂量，同时最小限度地减少健康组织的剂量。在这个过程中，被称为RT规划，临床专家团队在管理之前花费大量时间制定治疗计划。这个过程非常耗时，通常需要几十个小时，导致成本高，诊所的吞吐量有限。规划过程中的一个主要步骤是在患者的医学图像扫描中描绘肿瘤和周围健康器官的轮廓，这是一项称为轮廓绘制的任务。由此产生的描绘，称为RT结构，随后用于估计输送剂量和优化治疗计划。通常，肿瘤和器官的描绘是一个费力的手工过程，一种被称为基于图谱的轮廓绘制的图像处理技术已被证明能有效地加快这一步骤。在这里，专家在示例扫描上对健康器官的描绘（称为图谱）被自动扭曲到患者的扫描上。然而，已经发现这种方法仅在患者解剖结构与atlas.The概念验证项目的目的是使基于atlas的轮廓绘制对大多数（如果不是所有）患者准确工作的情况下有效。我们将通过开发创新技术来实现这一目标，该技术可以建立并快速搜索包含数千个代表人体解剖学广泛变异性的示例描绘的大规模地图集数据库。在类似于关键词的网络搜索的过程中，当应用于新患者时，系统将首先从数据库中检索最佳匹配的一个或多个病例，并且仅将那些病例用于基于图谱的轮廓绘制过程。