Simulation of local and global atrophy in alzheimer’s disease studies

Authors:
Oscar Camara-Rey;Martin Schweiger;Rachael I. Scahill;William R. Crum;Julia A. Schnabel;Derek L. G. Hill;Nick C. Fox
Affiliations:
Center of Medical Image Computing, Unviersity College of London, UK;Center of Medical Image Computing, Unviersity College of London, UK;Dementia Research Centre, Institute of Neurology, University College of London, UK;Center of Medical Image Computing, Unviersity College of London, UK;Center of Medical Image Computing, Unviersity College of London, UK;Center of Medical Image Computing, Unviersity College of London, UK;Dementia Research Centre, Institute of Neurology, University College of London, UK
Venue:
MICCAI'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - Volume Part II
Year:
2006

Citing 2
Cited 0

Marching cubes: A high resolution 3D surface construction algorithm

SIGGRAPH '87 Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
Validation of Non-rigid Registration Using Finite Element Methods

IPMI '01 Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Processing in Medical Imaging

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We propose a method for atrophy simulation in structural MR images based on finite-element methods, providing data for objective evaluation of atrophy measurement techniques. The modelling of diffuse global and regional atrophy is based on volumetric measurements from patients with known disease and guided by clinical knowledge of the relative pathological involvement of regions. The consequent biomechanical readjustment of structures is modelled using conventional physics-based techniques based on tissue properties and simulating plausible deformations with finite-element methods. Tissue characterization is performed by means of the meshing of a labelled brain atlas, creating a reference volumetric mesh, and a partial volume tissue model is used to reduce the impact of the mesh discretization. An example of simulated data is shown and a visual evaluation protocol used by experts has been developed to assess the degree of realism of the simulated images. First results demonstrate the potential of the proposed methodology.