Using machine learning algorithms to review computed tomography scans and assess risk for cardiovascular disease: Retrospective analysis from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST).

BACKGROUND: The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) demonstrated that annual screening with low dose CT in high-risk population was associated with reduction in lung cancer mortality. Nonetheless, the leading cause of mortality in the study was from cardiovascular diseases. PURPOSE: To determine whether the used machine learning automatic algorithms assessing coronary calcium score (CCS), level of liver steatosis and emphysema percentage in the lungs are good predictors of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality and incidence when applied on low dose CT scans. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Three fully automated machine learning algorithms were used to assess CCS, level of liver steatosis and emphysema percentage in the lung. The algorithms were used on low-dose computed tomography scans acquired from 12,332 participants in NLST. RESULTS: In a multivariate analysis, association between the three algorithm scores and CVD mortality have shown an OR of 1.72 (p = 0.003), 2.62 (p < 0.0001) for CCS scores of 101-400 and above 400 respectively, and an OR of 1.12 (p = 0.044) for level of liver steatosis. Similar results were shown for the incidence of CVD, OR of 1.96 (p < 0.0001), 4.94 (p < 0.0001) for CCS scores of 101-400 and above 400 respectively. Also, emphysema percentage demonstrated an OR of 0.89 (p < 0.0001). Similar results are shown for univariate analyses of the algorithms. CONCLUSION: The three automated machine learning algorithms could help physicians to assess the incidence and risk of CVD mortality in this specific population. Application of these algorithms to existing LDCT scans can provide valuable health care information and assist in future research.

A supervised framework for the registration and segmentation of white matter fiber tracts.

A supervised framework is presented for the automatic registration and segmentation of white matter (WM) tractographies extracted from brain DT-MRI. The framework relies on the direct registration between the fibers, without requiring any intensity-based registration as preprocessing. An affine transform is recovered together with a set of segmented fibers. A recently introduced probabilistic boosting tree classifier is used in a segmentation refinement step to improve the precision of the target tract segmentation. The proposed method compares favorably with a state-of-the-art intensity-based algorithm for affine registration of DTI tractographies. Segmentation results for 12 major WM tracts are demonstrated. Quantitative results are also provided for the segmentation of a particularly difficult case, the optic radiation tract. An average precision of 80% and recall of 55% were obtained for the optimal configuration of the presented method.

Co-registration of white matter tractographies by adaptive-mean-shift and Gaussian mixture modeling.

In this paper, we present a robust approach to the registration of white matter tractographies extracted from diffusion tensor-magnetic resonance imaging scans. The fibers are projected into a high dimensional feature space based on the sequence of their 3-D coordinates. Adaptive mean-shift clustering is applied to extract a compact set of representative fiber-modes (FM). Each FM is assigned to a multivariate Gaussian distribution according to its population thereby leading to a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) representation for the entire set of fibers. The registration between two fiber sets is treated as the alignment of two GMMs and is performed by maximizing their correlation ratio. A nine-parameters affine transform is recovered and eventually refined to a twelve-parameters affine transform using an innovative mean-shift based registration refinement scheme presented in this paper. The validation of the algorithm on synthetic intrasubject data demonstrates its robustness to interrupted and deviating fiber artifacts as well as outliers. Using real intrasubject data, a comparison is conducted to other intensity based and fiber-based registration algorithms, demonstrating competitive results. An option for tracking-in-time, on specific white matter fiber tracts, is also demonstrated on the real data.