Interactive local super-resolution reconstruction of whole-body MRI mouse data: a pilot study with applications to bone and kidney metastases.

Autor: Oleh Dzyubachyk, Artem Khmelinskii, Esben Plenge, Peter Kok, Thomas J A Snoeks, Dirk H J Poot, Clemens W G M Löwik, Charl P Botha, Wiro J Niessen, Louise van der Weerd, Erik Meijering, Boudewijn P F Lelieveldt
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2014
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 9, Iss 9, p e108730 (2014)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108730
Popis: In small animal imaging studies, when the locations of the micro-structures of interest are unknown a priori, there is a simultaneous need for full-body coverage and high resolution. In MRI, additional requirements to image contrast and acquisition time will often make it impossible to acquire such images directly. Recently, a resolution enhancing post-processing technique called super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) has been demonstrated to improve visualization and localization of micro-structures in small animal MRI by combining multiple low-resolution acquisitions. However, when the field-of-view is large relative to the desired voxel size, solving the SRR problem becomes very expensive, in terms of both memory requirements and computation time. In this paper we introduce a novel local approach to SRR that aims to overcome the computational problems and allow researchers to efficiently explore both global and local characteristics in whole-body small animal MRI. The method integrates state-of-the-art image processing techniques from the areas of articulated atlas-based segmentation, planar reformation, and SRR. A proof-of-concept is provided with two case studies involving CT, BLI, and MRI data of bone and kidney tumors in a mouse model. We show that local SRR-MRI is a computationally efficient complementary imaging modality for the precise characterization of tumor metastases, and that the method provides a feasible high-resolution alternative to conventional MRI.
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