3D Cerebral Vessel Location for Surgical Planning

描述（由申请人提供）： 这项竞争性更新申请旨在继续进行MR图像中血管和脑肿瘤自动分割的工作。之前的资助已经产生了30多个参考出版物，三个商业许可证/销售，以及多个机构在多个应用程序中使用的软件。目前的建议旨在继续这项工作，重点放在一个新的领域成熟的发展-诊断和分期的疾病的基础上的血管形状的统计分析。驱动临床问题是评估肿瘤恶性程度。尽管成像技术取得了进展，但良性肿瘤与恶性肿瘤的非侵入性鉴别仍然很困难。从组织学切片中观察到的一个重要结果是，与恶性肿瘤相关的血管具有独特的形状异常。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，而且还扩展到可以通过高分辨率体内成像研究描绘的较大血管。该方法涉及每个测试对象中的血管形状的区域测量与健康对象的图谱的类似区域中的血管形状的区域测量的统计比较。感兴趣区域是由肿瘤分割定义的区域。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)开发和评估一种新的方法，用于完全可变形的、多形态的、多模态的图谱形成。3)根据特定目标2制定的规则创建健康血管解剖结构图谱。4)扩展我们测量血管形状的方法，并通过四项临床研究评价评估肿瘤活性/恶性程度的方法。虽然该建议侧重于脑，但该方法适用于任何解剖位置的恶性肿瘤的评估。此外，尽管该建议集中于癌症，但一般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、血管病变和许多其他病理状态。

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.