3D Cerebral Vessel Location for Surgical Planning

描述(由申请人提供)： 这项竞争更新的应用程序旨在继续正在进行的从磁共振图像中自动分割血管和脑瘤的工作。以前的资助已经产生了30多份参考出版物、3份商业许可/销售以及多个机构在多个应用程序中使用的软件。目前的提案旨在继续这项工作，重点放在一个成熟开发的新领域--基于血管形状统计分析的疾病诊断和分期。驱动临床的问题是评估肿瘤的恶性程度。尽管成像技术取得了进步，但非侵入性区分良、恶性肿瘤仍然很困难。组织学工作者的一个重要观察结果是，与恶性肿瘤相关的血管具有明显的形状异常。我们的初步数据表明，这些血管形状异常不仅限于毛细血管水平的微小血管，还延伸到可从高分辨率体内成像研究中描绘出的较大血管。该方法包括对每个测试对象的血管形状的区域测量与健康受试者的图谱中类似区域的血管形状的测量进行统计比较。感兴趣区是由肿瘤分割确定的区域。具体目标是：1)完全自动化我们目前的血管和肿瘤分割方法。2)发展和评价了一种新的全变形、同胚、多模式地图集的生成方法。4)扩展我们测量血管形状的方法，并通过四项临床研究评估评估肿瘤活动性/恶性程度的方法。虽然这一建议侧重于脑，但该方法适用于任何解剖位置的恶性肿瘤的评估。此外，虽然这一建议侧重于癌症，但通用方法适用于影响血管的多种疾病的非侵入性诊断和分期，包括高血压、糖尿病、血管病变等许多病理状态。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application for competing renewal aims to continue ongoing work on automated segmentation of vessels and brain tumors from MR images. Previous funding has resulted in over 30 refereed publications, three commercial licensures/sales, and software used within multiple applications by multiple institutions. The current proposal aims to continue this work with focus upon a novel area ripe for development-the diagnosis and staging of disease based upon a statistical analysis of vessel shape. The driving clinical problem is that of assessing tumor malignancy. Despite advances in imaging technology, non-invasive differentiation of benign from malignant tumors remains difficult. An important observation made by those working from histological section is that vessels associated with malignancy possess distinctive shape abnormalities. Our preliminary data suggest that these vessel shape abnormalities are NOT restricted to tiny vessels at the capillary level, but also extend to larger vessels that can be delineated from high-resolution, in vivo imaging studies. The method involves a statistical comparison of regional measures of vessel shape in each test subject to that of the shapes of vessels in a similar region of an atlas of healthy subjects. The region of interest is that defined by tumor segmentation. Specific aims are to: 1) Fully automate our current vessel and tumor segmentation methods. 2) Develop and evaluate a new method for fully deformable, diffeomorphic, multi-modal atlas formation. 3) Create an atlas of healthy vascular anatomy under the rules developed by Specific Aim 2. 4) Extend our methods of measuring vessel shape and to evaluate the approach for assessing tumor activity/malignancy via four clinical studies. Although this proposal focuses upon brain, the method is applicable to the assessment of malignancy in any anatomical location. Furthermore, although this proposal focuses upon cancer, the general method is applicable to the noninvasive diagnosis and staging of the multiple diseases that affect blood vessels, including hypertension, diabetes, the vasculopathies, and many other pathological states.