Segmentation of corpus callosum using diffusion tensor imaging: validation in patients with glioblastoma

• Published in: BMC medical imaging Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 10
• Main Authors: Nazem-Zadeh, Mohammad-Reza, Saksena, Sona, Babajani-Fermi, Abbas, Jiang, Quan, Soltanian-Zadeh, Hamid, Rosenblum, Mark, Mikkelsen, Tom, Jain, Rajan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London BioMed Central 16.05.2012; BioMed Central Ltd; BMC
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analysis; Brain; Brain Neoplasms - pathology; Brain tumors; Care and treatment; Corpus callosum; Corpus Callosum - pathology; Diffusion; Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Diffusion tensor imaging; Female; Fiber bundle segmentation; Glioblastoma; Glioblastoma - pathology; Glioblastoma multiforme; Humans; Image Enhancement - methods; Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods; Imaging; Level-set; Magnetic resonance imaging; Male; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Methods; Middle Aged; Pattern Recognition, Automated - methods; Propagation; Radiology; Reproducibility of Results; Research Article; Sensitivity and Specificity; Subtraction Technique; Detroit Michigan; Level-set; Corpus callosum; Fiber bundle segmentation; Glioblastoma; Diffusion tensor imaging
• ISSN: 1471-2342; 1471-2342
• DOI: 10.1186/1471-2342-12-10

Background This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) method for segmenting corpus callosum in normal subjects and brain cancer patients with glioblastoma. Methods Nineteen patients with histologically confirmed treatment naïve glioblastoma and eleven normal control subjects underwent DTI on a 3T scanner. Based on the information inherent in diffusion tensors, a similarity measure was proposed and used in the proposed algorithm. In this algorithm, diffusion pattern of corpus callosum was used as prior information. Subsequently, corpus callosum was automatically divided into Witelson subdivisions. We simulated the potential rotation of corpus callosum under tumor pressure and studied the reproducibility of the proposed segmentation method in such cases. Results Dice coefficients, estimated to compare automatic and manual segmentation results for Witelson subdivisions, ranged from 94% to 98% for control subjects and from 81% to 95% for tumor patients, illustrating closeness of automatic and manual segmentations. Studying the effect of corpus callosum rotation by different Euler angles showed that although segmentation results were more sensitive to azimuth and elevation than skew, rotations caused by brain tumors do not have major effects on the segmentation results. Conclusions The proposed method and similarity measure segment corpus callosum by propagating a hyper-surface inside the structure (resulting in high sensitivity), without penetrating into neighboring fiber bundles (resulting in high specificity).