Neuromelanin magnetic resonance imaging (NM-MRI) has been widely used in the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) for its significantly enhanced contrast between the PD-related structure, the substantia nigra (SN) and surrounding tissues. This paper proposes a novel network combining the priority gating attention and Bayesian learning for improving the accuracy of fully automatic SN segmentation from NM-MRI. Different from the conventional gated attention model, the proposed network uses the prior SN probability map for guiding the attention computation. Additionally, to lower the risks of over-fitting and estimate the confidence scores for the segmentation results, Bayesian learning with Monte Carlo dropout is applied in the training and testing phases. The quantitative results showed that the proposed network acquired the averaged Dice score of 79.46% in comparison with the baseline model 77.93%.
Automatic segmentation of the Parkinson’s disease-related tissue, the substantia nigra (SN), is an important step towards the accurate computer-aided diagnosis systems. Recently deep learning methods have achieved the state-of-the-art performance of the automated segmentation in various scenarios of medical image analysis. However, to acquire high resolution segmentation results, the conventional deep learning frameworks depend heavily on the full size of annotated data, which is pretty time-consuming and expensive for the training of the model. Moreover, the SN structure is usually tiny and sensitive to the progression of Parkinson’s disease (PD), which brings more anatomic variations among cases. To deal with these problems, this paper combines the cascaded fully convolutional network (FCN) and the size-reweighted loss function to automatically segment the tiny subcortical tissue SN from T2 MRI volumes. Different from the conventional one-stage FCNs, we cascade two FCNs in a coarse-to-fine fashion for the high resolution segmentation of the SN. The first FCN is trained to locate the SN-contained ROI and produce a coarse segmentation mask from a down-sampled MRI volume. The second FCN solely segments the SN at full resolution based on the results of the first FCN. Additionally, by giving higher weights to the SN region, the size-reweighted loss function encourages the model to concentrate on the tiny SN structure. Our results showed that the proposed FCN achieves mean dice score of 68.92% in comparison with the baseline model 66.40%.
We propose a pattern-expression method based on rank-one tensor decomposition for analysis for substantia nigra in T2-weighted images. Capturing discriminative features in observed medical data is an important task in diagnosis. In diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, capturing the change of volumetric data of substantia nigra supports the clinical diagnosis. Furthermore, in drug discovery researches for Parkinson’s disease, statistical evaluations of changes of substantia nigra, which are caused by a developed medicine, also might be necessary. Therefore, we tackle the development of the pattern-expression method to analyse volumetric data of substantia nigra. Experimental results showed the different distributions of computed coefficients for rank-one tensors between Parkinson’s disease and healthy state. The results indicated the validity of the tensor-decomposition-based pattern-expression method for the analysis.
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