Abdominal musculature segmentation and surface prediction from CT using deep learning for sarcopenia assessment.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to build and train a deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) algorithm to segment muscular body mass (MBM) to predict muscular surface from a two-dimensional axial computed tomography (CT) slice through L3 vertebra. MATERIALS AND METHODS: An ensemble of 15 deep learning models with a two-dimensional U-net architecture with a 4-level depth and 18 initial filters were trained to segment MBM. The muscular surface values were computed from the predicted masks and corrected with the algorithm's estimated bias. Resulting mask prediction and surface prediction were assessed using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and root mean squared error (RMSE) scores respectively using ground truth masks as standards of reference. RESULTS: A total of 1025 individual CT slices were used for training and validation and 500 additional axial CT slices were used for testing. The obtained mean DSC and RMSE on the test set were 0.97 and 3.7 cm2 respectively. CONCLUSION: Deep learning methods using convolutional neural networks algorithm enable a robust and automated extraction of CT derived MBM for sarcopenia assessment, which could be implemented in a clinical workflow.

A Mixed-Effects Model with Time Reparametrization for Longitudinal Univariate Manifold-Valued Data.

Mixed-effects models provide a rich theoretical framework for the analysis of longitudinal data. However, when used to analyze or predict the progression of a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's disease, these models usually do not take into account the fact that subjects may be at different stages of disease progression and the interpretation of the model may depend on some implicit reference time. In this paper, we propose a generative statistical model for longitudinal data, described in a univariate Riemannian manifold setting, which estimates an average disease progression model, subject-specific time shifts and acceleration factors. The time shifts account for variability in age at disease-onset time. The acceleration factors account for variability in speed of disease progression. For a given individual, the estimated time shift and acceleration factor define an affine reparametrization of the average disease progression model. This statistical model has been used to analyze neuropsychological assessments scores and cortical thickness measurements from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. The numerical results showed that we can distinguish between slow versus fast progressing and early versus late-onset individuals.