A Longitudinal Method for Simultaneous Whole-Brain and Lesion Segmentation in Multiple Sclerosis
This work addresses the challenge of consistent brain and lesion segmentation over time for Multiple Sclerosis patients, which is incremental as it builds upon an existing cross-sectional method.
The researchers tackled the problem of segmenting longitudinal brain MRI scans in Multiple Sclerosis patients by developing a method that introduces subject-specific latent variables to ensure temporal consistency across scans. Preliminary results on three datasets showed that this approach produces more reliable segmentations and better detects disease effects compared to the existing cross-sectional method.
In this paper we propose a novel method for the segmentation of longitudinal brain MRI scans of patients suffering from Multiple Sclerosis. The method builds upon an existing cross-sectional method for simultaneous whole-brain and lesion segmentation, introducing subject-specific latent variables to encourage temporal consistency between longitudinal scans. It is very generally applicable, as it does not make any prior assumptions on the scanner, the MRI protocol, or the number and timing of longitudinal follow-up scans. Preliminary experiments on three longitudinal datasets indicate that the proposed method produces more reliable segmentations and detects disease effects better than the cross-sectional method it is based upon.