3D Quantification of Intracerebral Brain Hemorrhage

Researchers

  • Doc. Dr. Sven Lončarić, principal researcher

  • Dr. Atam P. Dhawan, US co-researcher

Institutions

  • Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Texas, Arlington, USA

Support

This three-year project is financed by Croatian Ministry of Science and Technology and by National Institutes of Health, USA.

Figure 1. Brain CT images

Abstract

Computed tomography (CT) allows three-dimensional (3-D) anatomical imaging of brain abnormalities such as human spontaneous intracerebral brain hemorrhage (ICH). With computerized image analysis, it is feasible to characterize the pathology of a selected volume of interest. The proposed research focuses on 3-D quantitative analysis to study the early evolution of the ICH. The underlying hypothesis is that the ICH volume and structure is related to the mortality and morbidity. Patients having ICH are scanned four times: within three hours after first symptoms, one hour later, eight hours later, and within twenty hours after first sympt oms. During the course of the illness, 3-D changes in ICH volume and structure can be observed and analyzed. The important ICH features are volume, position in space, and shape of primary and edema region. The preliminary studies indicate that the ICH volume is significant for the survival of the patient. The position in space must be measured with respect to an invariant 3-D coordinate system so that the movement of the ICH accross the scans can be determined. To achieve invariance it is necessary to perform registration of brain CT images from two scans. We have recently developed an Iterative Principal Axes Registration (IPAR) algorithm to register 3-D multi-modality brain images. We have also developed 3-D spatially weighted region growing algorithms with adaptive clustering for segmentation of ICH regions. Finally, shape features will be computed to correlate the shape evolution of the ICH to mortality and morbidity. In addition, the characteristic behavior of ICH can be correlated with the patient response to the medical treatment with the purpose of evaluating the treatment earlier during the course of the illness. It is expected that the proposed research would provide a computerized system for analysis of the ICH through the characteristic changes in ICH volume and structure during the course of the illness.

Research activities

The research activities on the project can be divided into several main groups:

  • Segmentation of CT head images

  • Interpolation of segmented images

  • Quantitative analisys

  • Visualization of the segmentation results

  • Statistical analisys

Results

During this project graphical user interface has been developed to provide neuroradiologist easier and more pleasent tool for their research work. The GUI has been developed in the Tcl/Tk script language. The segmentation results were then converted into the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) files. Binary volume is converted into poligons with the marching cubes algorithm.

Figure 2. Segmentation results: First row: Original image, skull, hemorrhage, brain, background, and calci cations; Second row: hemorrhage
after re nement, edema segmentation results.

Publications

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