Prediction of H3K27M Alteration Status in Brainstem Glioma Using Multi-Shell Diffusion MRI Metrics.

BACKGROUND: Multi-shell diffusion characteristics may help characterize brainstem gliomas (BSGs) and predict H3K27M status. PURPOSE: To identify the diffusion characteristics of BSG patients and investigate the predictive values of various diffusion metrics for H3K27M status in BSG. STUDY TYPE: Prospective. POPULATION: Eighty-four BSG patients (median age 10.5 years [IQR 6.8-30.0 years]) were included, of whom 56 were pediatric and 28 were adult patients. FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE: 3 T, multi-shell diffusion imaging. ASSESSMENT: Diffusion kurtosis imaging and neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging analyses were performed. Age, gender, and diffusion metrics, including fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial diffusivity, radial diffusivity (RD), mean kurtosis (MK), axial kurtosis (AK), radial kurtosis, intracellular volume fraction (ICVF), orientation dispersion index, and isotropic volume fraction (ISOVF), were compared between H3K27M-altered and wildtype BSG patients. STATISTICAL TESTS: Chi-square test, Mann-Whitney U test, multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), step-wise multivariable logistic regression. P-values <0.05 were considered significant. RESULTS: 82.4% pediatric and 57.1% adult patients carried H3K27M alteration. In the whole group, the H3K27M-altered BSGs demonstrated higher FA, AK and lower RD, ISOVF. The combination of age and median ISOVF showed fair performance for H3K27M prediction (AUC = 0.78). In the pediatric group, H3K27M-altered BSGs showed higher FA, AK, MK, ICVF and lower RD, MD, ISOVF. The combinations of median ISOVF, 5th percentile of FA, median MK and median MD showed excellent predictive power (AUC = 0.91). In the adult group, H3K27M-altered BSGs showed higher ICVF and lower RD, MD. The 75th percentile of RD demonstrated fair performance for H3K27M status prediction (AUC = 0.75). DATA CONCLUSION: Different alteration patterns of diffusion measures were identified between H3K27M-altered and wildtype BSGs, which collectively had fair to excellent predictive value for H3K27M alteration status, especially in pediatric patients. EVIDENCE LEVEL: 2 TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 3.

Deep Learning for Noninvasive Assessment of H3 K27M Mutation Status in Diffuse Midline Gliomas Using MR Imaging.

BACKGROUND: Determination of H3 K27M mutation in diffuse midline glioma (DMG) is key for prognostic assessment and stratifying patient subgroups for clinical trials. MRI can noninvasively depict morphological and metabolic characteristics of H3 K27M mutant DMG. PURPOSE: This study aimed to develop a deep learning (DL) approach to noninvasively predict H3 K27M mutation in DMG using T2-weighted images. STUDY TYPE: Retrospective and prospective. POPULATION: For diffuse midline brain gliomas, 341 patients from Center-1 (27 ± 19 years, 184 males), 42 patients from Center-2 (33 ± 19 years, 27 males) and 35 patients (37 ± 18 years, 24 males). For diffuse spinal cord gliomas, 133 patients from Center-1 (30 ± 15 years, 80 males). FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE: 5T and 3T, T2-weighted turbo spin echo imaging. ASSESSMENT: Conventional radiological features were independently reviewed by two neuroradiologists. H3 K27M status was determined by histopathological examination. The Dice coefficient was used to evaluate segmentation performance. Classification performance was evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve. STATISTICAL TESTS: Pearson's Chi-squared test, Fisher's exact test, two-sample Student's t-test and Mann-Whitney U test. A two-sided P value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULTS: In the testing cohort, Dice coefficients of tumor segmentation using DL were 0.87 for diffuse midline brain and 0.81 for spinal cord gliomas. In the internal prospective testing dataset, the predictive accuracies, sensitivities, and specificities of H3 K27M mutation status were 92.1%, 98.2%, 82.9% in diffuse midline brain gliomas and 85.4%, 88.9%, 82.6% in spinal cord gliomas. Furthermore, this study showed that the performance generalizes to external institutions, with predictive accuracies of 85.7%-90.5%, sensitivities of 90.9%-96.0%, and specificities of 82.4%-83.3%. DATA CONCLUSION: In this study, an automatic DL framework was developed and validated for accurately predicting H3 K27M mutation using T2-weighted images, which could contribute to the noninvasive determination of H3 K27M status for clinical decision-making. EVIDENCE LEVEL: 2 Technical Efficacy: Stage 2.

Amide proton transfer-weighted imaging of pediatric brainstem glioma and its predicted value for H3 K27 alteration.

BACKGROUND: Non-invasive determination of H3 K27 alteration of pediatric brainstem glioma (pedBSG) remains a clinical challenge. PURPOSE: To predict H3 K27-altered pedBSG using amide proton transfer-weighted (APTw) imaging. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This retrospective study included patients with pedBSG who underwent APTw imaging and had the H3 K27 alteration status determined by immunohistochemical staining. The presence or absence of foci of markedly increased APTw signal in the lesion was visually assessed. Quantitative APTw histogram parameters within the entire solid portion of tumors were extracted and compared between H3 K27-altered and wild-type groups using Student's t-test. The ability of APTw for differential diagnosis was evaluated using logistic regression. RESULTS: Sixty pedBSG patients included 48 patients with H3 K27-altered tumor (aged 2-48 years) and 12 patients with wild-type tumor (aged 3-53 years). Visual assessment showed that the foci of markedly increased APTw signal intensity were more common in the H3 K27-altered group than in wild-type group (60% vs. 16%, P = 0.007). Histogram parameters of APTw signal intensity in the H3 K27-altered group were significantly higher than those in the wild-type group (median, 2.74% vs. 2.22%, P = 0.02). The maximum (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC] = 0.72, P = 0.01) showed the highest diagnostic performance among histogram analysis. A combination of age, median and maximum APTw signal intensity could predict H3 K27 alteration with a sensitivity of 81%, specificity of 75% and AUC of 0.80. CONCLUSION: APTw imaging may serve as an imaging biomarker for H3 K27 alteration of pedBSGs.

Volumetric segmentation of white matter tracts with label embedding.

Convolutional neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance for white matter (WM) tract segmentation based on diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). However, the segmentation can still be difficult for challenging WM tracts with thin bodies or complicated shapes; the segmentation is even more problematic in challenging scenarios with reduced data quality or domain shift between training and test data, which can be easily encountered in clinical settings. In this work, we seek to improve the segmentation of WM tracts, especially for challenging WM tracts in challenging scenarios. In particular, our method is based on volumetric WM tract segmentation, where voxels are directly labeled without performing tractography. To improve the segmentation, we exploit the characteristics of WM tracts that different tracts can cross or overlap and revise the network design accordingly. Specifically, because multiple tracts can co-exist in a voxel, we hypothesize that the different tract labels can be correlated. The tract labels at a single voxel are concatenated as a label vector, the length of which is the number of tract labels. Due to the tract correlation, this label vector can be projected into a lower-dimensional space-referred to as the embedded space-for each voxel, which allows the segmentation network to solve a simpler problem. By predicting the coordinate in the embedded space for the tracts at each voxel and subsequently mapping the coordinate to the label vector with a reconstruction module, the segmentation result can be achieved. To facilitate the learning of the embedded space, an auxiliary label reconstruction loss is integrated with the segmentation accuracy loss during network training, and network training and inference are end-to-end. Our method was validated on two dMRI datasets under various settings. The results show that the proposed method improves the accuracy of WM tract segmentation, and the improvement is more prominent for challenging tracts in challenging scenarios.

Prediction of H3K27M-mutant brainstem glioma by amide proton transfer-weighted imaging and its derived radiomics.

PURPOSE: H3K27M-mutant associated brainstem glioma (BSG) carries a very poor prognosis. We aimed to predict H3K27M mutation status by amide proton transfer-weighted (APTw) imaging and radiomic features. METHODS: Eighty-one BSG patients with APTw imaging at 3T MR and known H3K27M status were retrospectively studied. APTw values (mean, median, and max) and radiomic features within manually delineated 3D tumor masks were extracted. Comparison of APTw measures between H3K27M-mutant and wildtype groups was conducted by two-sample Student's T/Mann-Whitney U test and receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis. H3K27M-mutant prediction using APTw-derived radiomics was conducted using a machine learning algorithm (support vector machine) in randomly selected train (n = 64) and test (n = 17) sets. Sensitivity analysis with additional random splits of train and test sets, 2D tumor masks, and other classifiers were conducted. Finally, a prospective cohort including 29 BSG patients was acquired for validation of the radiomics algorithm. RESULTS: BSG patients with H3K27M-mutant were younger and had higher max APTw values than those with wildtype. APTw-derived radiomic measures reflecting tumor heterogeneity could predict H3K27M mutation status with an accuracy of 0.88, sensitivity of 0.92, and specificity of 0.80 in the test set. Sensitivity analysis confirmed the predictive ability (accuracy range: 0.71-0.94). In the independent prospective validation cohort, the algorithm reached an accuracy of 0.86, sensitivity of 0.88, and specificity of 0.85 for predicting H3K27M-mutation status. CONCLUSION: BSG patients with H3K27M-mutant had higher max APTw values than those with wildtype. APTw-derived radiomics could accurately predict a H3K27M-mutant status in BSG patients.

Clinical, pathological, and radiological features of 80 pediatric diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas: A single-institute study.

Objective: Diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas (DIPGs) are rare but devastating diseases. This retrospective cross-sectional study aimed to investigate the clinical, radiological, and pathological features of DIPGs. Materials and methods: The clinical data of 80 pediatric DIPGs under clinical treatment in Beijing Tiantan Hospital from July 2013 to July 2019 were retrospectively collected and studied. A follow-up evaluation was performed. Results: This study included 48 men and 32 women. The most common symptoms were cranial nerve palsy (50.0%, 40/80 patients) and limb weakness (41.2%, 33/80 patients). Among the 80 patients, 24 cases were clinically diagnosed, 56 cases were pathologically verified, and 45 cases were tested for H3K27 alteration status, with 34 H3K27 alteration cases confirmed. Radiological results indicated that enhancement was common (65.0%, 52/80 patients). Cho/Cr was of predictive value for H3K27 alteration status (P = 0.012, cutoff value = 2.38, AUC = 0.801). Open cranial surgery followed by further chemotherapy and radiotherapy was beneficial for patients' overall survival. Cox regression analysis indicated H3K27 alteration to be the independent prognostic influencing factor for DIPGs in this series (P = 0.002). Conclusion: DIPGs displayed a wide spectrum of clinical and imaging features. Surgery-suitable patients could benefit from postoperative comprehensive therapy for a better overall survival. H3K27 alteration was the independent prognostic influencing factor for DIPGs.

Deep learning based on preoperative magnetic resonance (MR) images improves the predictive power of survival models in primary spinal cord astrocytomas.

BACKGROUND: Prognostic models for spinal cord astrocytoma patients are lacking due to the low incidence of the disease. Here, we aim to develop a fully automated deep learning (DL) pipeline for stratified overall survival (OS) prediction based on preoperative MR images. METHODS: A total of 587 patients diagnosed with intramedullary tumors were retrospectively enrolled in our hospital to develop an automated pipeline for tumor segmentation and OS prediction. The automated pipeline included a T2WI-based tumor segmentation model and 3 cascaded binary OS prediction models (1-year, 3-year, and 5-year models). For the tumor segmentation model, 439 cases of intramedullary tumors were used to model training and testing using a transfer learning strategy. A total of 138 patients diagnosed with astrocytomas were included to train and test the OS prediction models via 10 × 10-fold cross-validation using CNNs. RESULTS: The dice of the tumor segmentation model with the test set was 0.852. The results indicated that the best input of OS prediction models was a combination of T2W and T1C images and the tumor mask. The 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year automated OS prediction models achieved accuracies of 86.0%, 84.0%, and 88.0% and AUCs of 0.881 (95% CI 0.839-0.918), 0.862 (95% CI 0.827-0.901), and 0.905 (95% CI 0.867-0.942), respectively. The automated DL pipeline achieved 4-class OS prediction (<1 year, 1-3 years, 3-5 years, and >5 years) with 75.3% accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: We proposed an automated DL pipeline for segmenting spinal cord astrocytomas and stratifying OS based on preoperative MR images.

Automated Determination of the H3 K27-Altered Status in Spinal Cord Diffuse Midline Glioma by Radiomics Based on T2-Weighted MR Images.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Conventional MR imaging is not sufficient to discern the H3 K27-altered status of spinal cord diffuse midline glioma. This study aimed to develop a radiomics-based model based on preoperative T2WI to determine the H3 K27-altered status of spinal cord diffuse midline glioma. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ninety-seven patients with confirmed spinal cord diffuse midline gliomas were retrospectively recruited and randomly assigned to the training (n = 67) and test (n = 30) sets. One hundred seven radiomics features were initially extracted from automatically-segmented tumors on T2WI, then 11 features selected by the Pearson correlation coefficient and the Kruskal-Wallis test were used to train and test a logistic regression model for predicting the H3 K27-altered status. Sensitivity analysis was performed using additional random splits of the training and test sets, as well as applying other classifiers for comparison. The performance of the model was evaluated through its accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve. Finally, a prospective set including 28 patients with spinal cord diffuse midline gliomas was used to validate the logistic regression model independently. RESULTS: The logistic regression model accurately predicted the H3 K27-altered status with accuracies of 0.833 and 0.786, sensitivities of 0.813 and 0.750, specificities of 0.857 and 0.833, and areas under the curve of 0.839 and 0.818 in the test and prospective sets, respectively. Sensitivity analysis confirmed the robustness of the model, with predictive accuracies of 0.767-0.833. CONCLUSIONS: Radiomics signatures based on preoperative T2WI could accurately predict the H3 K27-altered status of spinal cord diffuse midline glioma, providing potential benefits for clinical management.

Quantitatively mapping local quality of super-resolution microscopy by rolling Fourier ring correlation.

In fluorescence microscopy, computational algorithms have been developed to suppress noise, enhance contrast, and even enable super-resolution (SR). However, the local quality of the images may vary on multiple scales, and these differences can lead to misconceptions. Current mapping methods fail to finely estimate the local quality, challenging to associate the SR scale content. Here, we develop a rolling Fourier ring correlation (rFRC) method to evaluate the reconstruction uncertainties down to SR scale. To visually pinpoint regions with low reliability, a filtered rFRC is combined with a modified resolution-scaled error map (RSM), offering a comprehensive and concise map for further examination. We demonstrate their performances on various SR imaging modalities, and the resulting quantitative maps enable better SR images integrated from different reconstructions. Overall, we expect that our framework can become a routinely used tool for biologists in assessing their image datasets in general and inspire further advances in the rapidly developing field of computational imaging.

A transfer learning approach to few-shot segmentation of novel white matter tracts.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for white matter (WM) tract segmentation based on diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). The training of the CNN-based segmentation model generally requires a large number of manual delineations of WM tracts, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Although it is possible to carefully curate abundant training data for a set of WM tracts of interest, there can also be novel WM tracts-i.e., WM tracts that are not included in the existing annotated WM tracts-that are specific to a new scientific problem, and it is desired that the novel WM tracts can be segmented without repeating the laborious collection of a large number of manual delineations for these tracts. One possible solution to the problem is to transfer the knowledge learned for segmenting existing WM tracts to the segmentation of novel WM tracts with a fine-tuning strategy, where a CNN pretrained for segmenting existing WM tracts is fine-tuned with only a few annotated scans to segment the novel WM tracts. However, in classic fine-tuning, the information in the last task-specific layer for segmenting existing WM tracts is completely discarded. In this work, based on the pretraining and fine-tuning framework, we propose an improved transfer learning approach to the segmentation of novel WM tracts in the few-shot setting, where all knowledge in the pretrained model is incorporated into the fine-tuning procedure. Specifically, from the weights of the pretrained task-specific layer for segmenting existing WM tracts, we derive a better initialization of the last task-specific layer for the target model that segments novel WM tracts. In addition, to allow further improvement of the initialization of the last layer and thus the segmentation performance in the few-shot setting, we develop a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy that generates synthetic annotated images with tract-aware image mixing. To validate the proposed method, we performed experiments on brain dMRI scans from public and private datasets under various experimental settings, and the results indicate that our method improves the performance of few-shot segmentation of novel WM tracts.

White matter alterations in pediatric brainstem glioma: An national brain tumor registry of China study.

Background: Previous studies have identified alterations in structural connectivity of patients with glioma. However, white matter (WM) integrity measured by diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI) in pediatric patients with brainstem glioma (BSG) was lack of study. Here, the alterations in WM of patients with BSG were assessed through DKI analyses. Materials and methods: This study involved 100 patients with BSG from the National Brain Tumor Registry of China (NBTRC) and 50 age- and sex-matched healthy controls from social recruitment. WM tracts were segmented and reconstructed using U-Net and probabilistic bundle-specific tracking. Next, automatic fiber quantitative (AFQ) analyses of WM tracts were performed using tractometry module embedded in TractSeg. Results: WM quantitative analysis identified alterations in DKI-derived values in patients with BSG compared with healthy controls. WM abnormalities were detected in the projection fibers involved in the brainstem, including corticospinal tract (CST), superior cerebellar peduncle (SCP), middle cerebellar peduncle (MCP) and inferior cerebellar peduncle (ICP). Significant WM alterations were also identified in commissural fibers and association fibers, which were away from tumor location. Statistical analyses indicated the severity of WM abnormality was statistically correlated with the preoperative Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS) and symptom duration of patients respectively. Conclusion: The results of this study indicated the widely distributed WM alterations in patients with BSG. DKI-derived quantitative assessment may provide additional information and insight into comprehensively understanding the neuropathological mechanisms of brainstem glioma.

Automated Classification of Intramedullary Spinal Cord Tumors and Inflammatory Demyelinating Lesions Using Deep Learning.

Accurate differentiation of intramedullary spinal cord tumors and inflammatory demyelinating lesions and their subtypes are warranted because of their overlapping characteristics at MRI but with different treatments and prognosis. The authors aimed to develop a pipeline for spinal cord lesion segmentation and classification using two-dimensional MultiResUNet and DenseNet121 networks based on T2-weighted images. A retrospective cohort of 490 patients (118 patients with astrocytoma, 130 with ependymoma, 101 with multiple sclerosis [MS], and 141 with neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorders [NMOSD]) was used for model development, and a prospective cohort of 157 patients (34 patients with astrocytoma, 45 with ependymoma, 33 with MS, and 45 with NMOSD) was used for model testing. In the test cohort, the model achieved Dice scores of 0.77, 0.80, 0.50, and 0.58 for segmentation of astrocytoma, ependymoma, MS, and NMOSD, respectively, against manual labeling. Accuracies of 96% (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC], 0.99), 82% (AUC, 0.90), and 79% (AUC, 0.85) were achieved for the classifications of tumor versus demyelinating lesion, astrocytoma versus ependymoma, and MS versus NMOSD, respectively. In a subset of radiologically difficult cases, the classifier showed an accuracy of 79%-95% (AUC, 0.78-0.97). The established deep learning pipeline for segmentation and classification of spinal cord lesions can support an accurate radiologic diagnosis. Supplemental material is available for this article. © RSNA, 2022 Keywords: Spinal Cord MRI, Astrocytoma, Ependymoma, Multiple Sclerosis, Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder, Deep Learning.