Tissue segmentation in MRI

多发性硬化症（MS）是年轻人最常见的神经系统疾病，在加拿大约有50,000人受到影响。该疾病的特征是中枢神经系统的短暂性发作，导致肢体麻木或无力、协调、眩晕或视觉功能障碍。目前尚无治疗方法。在过去的十年中，一些新的治疗方法已经被批准用于临床使用，主要是基于证明它们能够减少新病变的数量。这些药物可减少30-50%的发作次数。评估更新、更有效的治疗方法需要临床试验，其中“疾病负担”是通过磁共振成像（MRI）中发现的新病变来衡量的。在制药工业中，病变识别的最新技术由主观的手动或半手动程序组成。这个过程受制于观察者之间和观察者内部的可变性，这降低了检测药物效应的统计能力。为了解决这个问题，必须增加研究对象的数量，这是一个非常昂贵的选择。该项目的目标是开发一种强大、准确和全自动的组织分类技术，当应用于真实的临床MRI数据时，可以识别健康和病变组织。有效成功的药物开发将受益于这种技术，因为检测变化的改进的统计能力可用于减少所需的受试者数量或减少在临床试验中检测治疗效果所需的时间（或两者兼而有之）。在任何一种情况下，试验成本都降低了，从而能够评估更多的候选治疗方法。这一过程也将有利于学术研究实验室对MRI数据的分析，以进一步了解MS的疾病过程，从而找到更好、更有效的治疗方法。

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the most common neurological disease of young adults, affecting approximately 50,000 people in Canada. The disease is characterized by transient attacks on the central nervous system and results in numbness or weakness of a limb, in coordination, vertigo or visual dysfunction. At present there is no cure. Over the last decade, a number of new therapies have been approved for clinical use based primarily on demonstration of their ability to reduce the number of new lesions. These drugs reduce the number of attacks by 30-50%. Evaluation of newer, more efficient treatments requires clinical trails where the "burden of disease" is measured by identification of new lesions seen in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The state of the art for lesion identification in the pharmaceutical industry consists of subjective manual or semi-manual procedures. This process is subject to inter- and intra-observer variability that diminishes the statistical power to detect a drug effect. To address this problem, one must increase the number of subjects in the study a very expensive option.The goal of this project is to develop a robust, accurate and fully automatic tissue classification technique that can identify healthy and diseased tissues when applied to real clinical MRI data. Efficient successful drug development would benefit from such a technique because the improved statistical power to detect change can be used to diminish the number of subjects required or reduce the amount of time required to detect a treatment effect in a clinical trials (or both). In either case, trial costs are reduced, thus enabling the evaluation more candidate treatments. This procedure would also benefit academic research laboratories for the analysis of MRI data to further understand the disease process in MS in order to find finding better, more efficient treatments.