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Echo-planar imaging (EPI) is a fast nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method. Unfortunately, local magnetic field inhomogeneities induced mainly by the subject's presence cause significant geometrical distortion, predominantly along the phase-encoding direction, which must be undone to allow for meaningful further processing. So far, this aspect has been too often neglected. In this paper, ...

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Breast cancer continues to be a significant public health problem in the United States. Approximately, 182,000 new cases of breast cancer are diagnosed and 46,000 women die of breast cancer each year. Even more disturbing is the fact that one out of eight women in the United States will develop breast cancer at some point during her lifetime. Since the cause of breast cancer remains unknown, prima...

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A new approach to the problem of multimodality medical image registration is proposed, using a basic concept from information theory, mutual information (MI), or relative entropy, as a new matching criterion. The method presented in this paper applies MI to measure the statistical dependence or information redundancy between the image intensities of corresponding voxels in both images, which is assumed to be maximal if the images are geometrically aligned. Maximization of MI is a very general and powerful criterion, because no assumptions are made regarding the nature of this dependence and no limiting constraints are imposed on the image content of the modalities involved. The accuracy of the MI criterion is validated for rigid body registration of computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), and photon emission tomography (PET) images by comparison with the stereotactic registration solution, while robustness is evaluated with respect to implementation issues, such as interpolation and optimization, and image content, including partial overlap and image degradation. Our results demonstrate that subvoxel accuracy with respect to the stereotactic reference solution can be achieved completely automatically and without any prior segmentation, feature extraction, or other preprocessing steps which makes this method very well suited for clinical applications.

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After conception and implementation of any new medical image processing algorithm, validation is an important step to ensure that the procedure fulfils all requirements set forth at the initial design stage. Although the algorithm must be evaluated on real data, a comprehensive validation requires the additional use of simulated data since it is impossible to establish ground truth with in vivo data. Experiments with simulated data permit controlled evaluation over a wide range of conditions (e.g., different levels of noise, contrast, intensity artefacts, or geometric distortion). Such considerations have become increasingly important with the rapid growth of neuroimaging, i.e., computational analysis of brain structure and function using brain scanning methods such as positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. Since simple objects such as ellipsoids or parallelepipedes do not reflect the complexity of natural brain anatomy, the authors present the design and creation of a realistic, high-resolution, digital, volumetric phantom of the human brain. This three-dimensional digital brain phantom is made up of ten volumetric data sets that define the spatial distribution for different tissues (e.g., grey matter, white matter, muscle, skin, etc.), where voxel intensity is proportional to the fraction of tissue within the voxel. The digital brain phantom can be used to simulate tomographic images of the head. Since the contribution of each tissue type to each voxel in the brain phantom is known, it can be used as the gold standard to test analysis algorithms such as classification procedures which seek to identify the tissue "type" of each image voxel. Furthermore, since the same anatomical phantom may be used to drive simulators for different modalities, it is the ideal tool to test intermodality registration algorithms. The brain phantom and simulated MR images have been made publicly available on the Internet (http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/brainweb).

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Image interpolation techniques often are required in medical imaging for image generation (e.g., discrete back projection for inverse Radon transform) and processing such as compression or resampling. Since the ideal interpolation function spatially is unlimited, several interpolation kernels of finite size have been introduced. This paper compares 1) truncated and windowed sine; 2) nearest neighbor; 3) linear; 4) quadratic; 5) cubic B-spline; 6) cubic; g) Lagrange; and 7) Gaussian interpolation and approximation techniques with kernel sizes from 1/spl times/1 up to 8/spl times/8. The comparison is done by: 1) spatial and Fourier analyses; 2) computational complexity as well as runtime evaluations; and 3) qualitative and quantitative interpolation error determinations for particular interpolation tasks which were taken from common situations in medical image processing. For local and Fourier analyses, a standardized notation is introduced and fundamental properties of interpolators are derived. Successful methods should be direct current (DC)-constant and interpolators rather than DC-inconstant or approximators. Each method's parameters are tuned with respect to those properties. This results in three novel kernels, which are introduced in this paper and proven to be within the best choices for medical image interpolation: the 6/spl times/6 Blackman-Harris windowed sinc interpolator, and the C2-continuous cubic kernels with N=6 and N=8 supporting points. For quantitative error evaluations, a set of 50 direct digital X-rays was used. They have been selected arbitrarily from clinical routine. In general, large kernel sizes were found to be superior to small interpolation masks. Except for truncated sine interpolators, all kernels with N=6 or larger sizes perform significantly better than N=2 or N=3 point methods (p/spl Lt/0.005). However, the differences within the group of large-sized kernels were not significant. Summarizing the results, the cubic 6/spl times/6 interpolator with continuous second derivatives, as defined in (24), can be recommended for most common interpolation tasks. It appears to be the fastest six-point kernel to implement computationally. It provides eminent local and Fourier properties, is easy to implement, and has only small errors. The same characteristics apply to B-spline interpolation, but the 6/spl times/6 cubic avoids the intrinsic border effects produced by the B-spline technique. However, the goal of this study was not to determine an overall best method, but to present a comprehensive catalogue of methods in a uniform terminology, to define general properties and requirements of local techniques, and to enable the reader to select that method which is optimal for his specific application in medical imaging.

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