Volume-Based Analysis of 6-Month-Old Infant Brain MRI for Autism Biomarker Identification and Early Diagnosis.

Volume-Based Analysis of 6-Month-Old Infant Brain MRI for Autism Biomarker Identification and Early Diagnosis. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv. 2018 Sep;11072:411-419 Authors: Wang L, Li G, Shi F, Cao X, Lian C, Nie D, Liu M, Zhang H, Li G, Wu Z, Lin W, Shen D Abstract Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is mainly diagnosed by the observation of core behavioral symptoms. Due to the absence of early biomarkers to detect infants either with or at-risk of ASD during the first postnatal year of life, diagnosis must rely on behavioral observations long after birth. As a result, the window of opportunity for effective intervention may have passed when the disorder is detected. Therefore, it is clinically urgent to identify imaging-based biomarkers for early diagnosis and intervention. In this paper, for the first time, we proposed a volume-based analysis of infant subjects with risk of ASD at very early age, i.e., as early as at 6 months of age. A critical part of volume-based analysis is to accurately segment 6-month-old infant brain MRI scans into different regions of interest, e.g., white matter, gray matter, and cerebrospinal fluid. This is actually very challenging since the tissue contrast at 6-month-old is extremely low, caused by inherent ongoing myelination and maturation. To address this challenge, we propose an anatomy-guided, densely-connected network for accurate tissue segmentation. Based on tissue segmentations, we further ...
Source: MICCAI International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - Category: Radiology Tags: Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv Source Type: research