title: Voxelwise atlas rating for computer assisted diagnosis: Application to congenital heart diseases of the great arteries.
abstract: Atlas-based analysis methods rely on the morphological similarity between the atlas and target images, and on the availability of labelled images. Problems can arise when the deformations introduced by pathologies affect the similarity between the atlas and a patient's image. The aim of this work is to exploit the morphological dissimilarities between atlas databases and pathological images to diagnose the underlying clinical condition, while avoiding the dependence on labelled images. We propose a voxelwise atlas rating approach (VoxAR) relying on multiple atlas databases, each representing a particular condition. Using a local image similarity measure to assess the morphological similarity between the atlas and target images, a rating map displaying for each voxel the condition of the atlases most similar to the target is defined. The final diagnosis is established by assigning the condition of the database the most represented in the rating map. We applied the method to diagnose three different conditions associated with dextro-transposition of the great arteries, a congenital heart disease. The proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods using annotated images, with an accuracy of 97.3% when evaluated on a set of 60 whole heart MR images containing healthy and pathological subjects using cross validation.
authors.affiliation: Translational Imaging Group, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, UK. Electronic address: maria.zuluaga@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Maria A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Zuluaga
authors.affiliation: Translational Imaging Group, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, UK.
authors.forename: Ninon
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Burgos
authors.affiliation: Translational Imaging Group, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, UK.
authors.forename: Alex F
authors.initials: AF
authors.lastname: Mendelson
authors.affiliation: Centre for Cardiovascular Imaging, UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science, London, UK; Cardiorespiratory Division, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London, UK.
authors.forename: Andrew M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.affiliation: Translational Imaging Group, Centre for Medical Image Computing, University College London, UK.
authors.forename: Sébastien
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ourselin
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D018810:Magnetic Resonance Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D013382:Subtraction Technique; D014188:Transposition of Great Vessels / Q000473:pathology*
keywords: Atlases; Computer-aided diagnosis; Congenital heart diseases; Image synthesis; Voxel rating