Automatic Quantification and Labeling of Cerebral Microbleeds, Oxygen Saturation and Sources of Abnormal Susceptibility

ABSTRACT The detectionlocalization and quantification of cerebral microbleedsCMBsplays an important role in diagnosing and establishing appropriate treatment plans in neurodegenerative diseases specifically in vascular dementiaVaDTo dateevaluating CMBs is time consuminginaccurate and sometimes not possibleWe propose to mitigate these problems by developing our softwareqSPINthat will provide fast and easy to use methods forautomatic identification of CMBs and veinsautomatic quantification of CMBsautomatic quantification of oxygen saturation in veinsandcreation of a user friendly software for the practicing radiologistRecent developments in MRI have provided a new means by which to study the role of CMBs and venous abnormalities in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer s DiseaseADVaDstroke and traumatic brain injuryTBISusceptibility weighted imagingSWIhas proven to be a powerful tool by which to detect CMBs and quantitative susceptibility mappingQSMcan be used to measure changes in oxygen saturationKnowing how many CMBs there are can predict the onset of VaDdetermine whether anti platelet therapy in stroke should be usedand correlate with neuropsychological outcome for patients with TBIOur recent version of multi echo SWI makes it possible to obtain both an arteriogram and a venogram simultaneouslyOxygen saturation can also be used to monitor perfusion changes and extend the window of treatment in strokeCurrentlymost radiologists and technologists do not have time to perform such detailed quantitative processing and thus it is not being done clinicallyOur qSPIN software will provide this quantitative dataWith the numbersizeand location of CMBs or venous abnormalitiesa better diagnosis would be possibleOur group is uniquely positioned to address this problem having developed many of these techniquesThe novelty of our approach is the marriage of SWIQSMSTAGE and deep learning techniques to detect these vascular and functional abnormalitiesTo accomplish the goals of this proposalwe will develop user friendly software that incorporates all imaging information from SWI and QSM to label CMBsWe will also provide the location of the CMBs in Talairach coordinates using a template datasetIn the endwe will have a complete picture of the prevalence of CMBsabnormal oxygen saturation and their locations in patients with neurodegenerative disease that will improve diagnosis and potentially change their treatment PROJECT NARRATIVE There is a huge demand today for a comprehensive analysis of diseases with cerebral microbleedsabnormal oxygen saturation and thrombosis such as vascular dementiaThe quantification of these features will have major ramifications for the diagnosis and treatment of dementia as well hypertensionstroke and traumatic brain injury all of which can lead to dementiaThereforeour major objective in this application is to design and develop advanced image processing software that can rapidly and accurately identify and quantify the presence of cerebral microbleeds and changes in oxygen saturation in dementia and related diseases