Medical Image Analysis 4 (2000) 123–136 www.elsevier.com / locate / media

Volume distribution of cerebrospinal fluid using multispectral MR imaging a, a b a Arvid Lundervold *, Torfinn Taxt , Lars Ersland , Anne Marie Fenstad a

˚ Section for Medical Image Analysis and Informatics, Department of Physiology, University of Bergen, Arstadveien 19, N-5009 Bergen, Norway b Department of Clinical Engineering, Haukeland University Hospital, N-5021 Bergen, Norway Received 19 September 1997; received in revised form 12 November 1998; accepted 18 June 1999

Abstract The goal of this study was to design a reliable method to quantify and visualize the anatomical distribution of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) intracranially. The method should be clinically applicable and based on multispectral analysis of three-dimensional (3D) magnetic resonance images. T1-weighted, T2-weighted and proton density-weighted fast 3D gradient pulse sequences were used to form high resolution multispectral 3D images of the entire head. Training on single 2D slices, the Mahalanobis distances between the resulting multivariate tissue-specific densities were studied as functions of the feature vector composition and dimension. Multispectral analysis was applied to the images of four human brains. One feature vector with three components gave CSF volumes that were in the normal range and corresponding anatomical distributions that largely agreed with general anatomical knowledge. The exception was CSF missing around the basal parts of the brain due to signal artifacts. These artifacts were almost certainly due to the coil effect and magnetic field inhomogeneities induced by the imaged head. Such misclassifications could probably be reduced by bias field estimation and proper image restoration. Most CSF voxels formed large connected components that were found automatically, so the manual post-processing of the classified 3D image to locate CSF voxels was moderate. It is concluded that some of the fast, high resolution 3D gradient echo pulse sequences that have become available on conventional clinical scanners can be used to obtain good estimates of brain cerebrospinal fluid anatomical distribution and volume.  2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: 3D MR imaging; Cerebrospinal fluid; Multispectral analysis; Visualization

1. Introduction Changes in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volume and its anatomical distribution are important signs associated with several neurological diseases caused by malformations (Fletcher et al., 1992; Brandt et al., 1994), infections (Dal-Pan et al., 1992; Jernigan et al., 1993), and degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease (Harris et al., 1991). Thus, accurate and easy-to-use methods to determine CSF volume and its distribution are of primary, clinical significance. The magnetic resonance (MR) imaging modality was the first which really allowed determination of the CSF *Corresponding author. Tel.: 147-55-58-6353; fax: 147-55-58-6410. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Lundervold)

volume and its distribution with a reasonable precision. Initially, the three-dimensional (3D) CSF distribution was found by segmenting either a single 18 cm thick 2D slice image covering the whole brain (Condon et al., 1986) or by segmenting successive 2D image sections of 3–10 mm thickness, using manual delineation (Condon et al., 1986) or thresholding techniques (Suzuki and Toriwaki, 1991; DeCarli et al., 1992). Alternatively, whole brain or regional CSF volumes can be estimated from spin echo 2D pulse sequences with two or more echoes using statistical classification (Cline et al., 1990; Agartz et al., 1992; Kikinis et al., 1992), vector decomposition (Rusinek et al., 1991; Peck et al., 1992), simultaneous incorporation of signal intensities and boundary information in a Bayesian framework (Lundervold and Storvik, 1995), feature space compartmentalization (Bonar et al., 1993), image subtrac-

1361-8415 / 00 / $ – see front matter  2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S1361-8415( 00 )00009-8

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tion followed by thresholding (Lim and Pfefferbaum, 1989; Harris et al., 1991), bivariate thresholding (Kohn et al., 1991; Tanna et al., 1991), or a rule-based system (Raya, 1990) to exploit more of the multispectral nature inherent in the MR signal. It is not necessary to find the spatial distribution of CSF to determine its volume. The CSF volume can be found by using a partial volume model to segment the gray scale histogram of a 3D MR image of the head. So far, this has only been done for 3D images formed by acquisition of successive 2D slice images (Santago and Gage, 1993). Major problems with conventional multislice techniques to obtain a usable 3D dataset are a too long acquisition time, a low signal-to-noise ratio, or too low spatial resolution in one or more dimensions of the resulting 3D image. Recently, true 3D MR image acquisition techniques have been used to reduce the problems associated with 2D multislice techniques when the CSF volume and distribution are to be found. Semiautomated contour tracing techniques (Filipek et al., 1989), and 3D edge detection (Bomans et al., 1990) have been applied to 3D images of normal volunteers. The published methods to determine the distribution and volume of CSF using 3D pulse sequences represent an improvement compared to methods based on 2D image acquisitions. However, the multispectral nature of the MR signal has not been exploited to obtain the best possible segmentation results when using 3D pulse sequences, except in a preliminary study which used two-channel dual flip angle volume acquisitions (Lemieux and Free, 1994). This study takes advantage of some of the fast 3D pulse sequences (Frahm et al., 1987; Gyngell, 1988; Redpath and Jones, 1988; Mugler and Brookeman, 1990) that have become available on conventional clinical scanners. This approach gives acceptable acquisition times for routine clinical use even when a high resolution, multispectral 3D image is obtained, consisting of T1-weighted, T2-weighted and proton density (PD) weighted 3D channel images. The training of the classifier combines clustering and supervised labeling of voxels (Taxt et al., 1992), and this is done in a single 2D slice image within the acquired dataset previous to classification of the full 3D image. The multispectral analysis method was applied to images of the brain in four healthy volunteers. It is concluded that the combination of high resolution, fast 3D pulse sequences and an efficient multispectral analysis makes the determination of the CSF anatomical distribution possible in a clinical setting. Section 2 gives a detailed description of the fast 3D gradient echo pulse sequences used and the reasons for selecting these particular sequences. The special training technique, the 3D contextual statistical classifier and the visualization method are also explained in this section. The results from the statistical classification and the experimentally determined CSF volumes and their spatial distribution are reported in Section 3. Section 4 gives a discussion and

considers possible improvements of the present method. A preliminary report of this study has appeared elsewhere (Lundervold et al., 1995b).

2. Data and methods The data acquisition procedure and the imaged subjects are described first. Subsequently, the statistical classification methods and a summary of the visualization and quantification methods are presented.

2.1. Image acquisition Multispectral 3D images were acquired with sagittal slicing, using a standard circularly polarized head coil. The MR scanner (Siemens Impact, 1992) operated at 0.95 Tesla and was equipped with 15 mT / m gradients. The radiofrequency field of the MR scanner was calibrated a few days before the image acquisitions. The characteristic curve was well within the limits specified for the system with a peak inhomogeneity after shimming of 25.64 / 1 4.04 ppm within a sphere of diameter 45 cm. Each 3D channel image, produced by a given 3D pulse sequence, consisted of 128 contiguous slices from a 180 mm slab, with effective slice thickness of about 1.4 mm. The field of view in the sagittal plane was 256 3 256 mm 2 . The acquisition matrix in k-space was 128 3 256 with zero-filling to 256 3 256. Phase encoding was in the anterior–posterior direction to avoid pulsation artifacts from the cervical arteries. Using the above parameter values it follows that the acquisition voxel size was 1.0 3 1.0 3 1.4 mm 3 giving a voxel volume of 1.4 ml used for further calculations. The formation of multispectral 3D MR images of the brain from 3D channel images assumes that there is no head movement during the entire acquisition time. Otherwise, the channel images would not be in register, and our multispectral approach would not be applicable. Care was taken to avoid any head movement by using foam pads and evacuated polystyrene bags for head immobilization in the coil. However, unavoidable local movement of the eyeballs introduced small stripe-artifacts in the phase encoding direction of the channel image.

2.1.1. The fast 3 D pulse sequences A total of five different fast 3D pulse sequences were tested. We did not include 2D fast spin echo in this study since it required acquisition of two interleaved data sets to cover the whole brain with a voxel resolution comparable to true 3D acquisitions. With appropriate timing parameters each sequence could be grouped as either T1-weighted, T2-weighted, or PD-weighted (Table 1). 2.1.1.1. T1 -weighted pulse sequences. FLASH, the Fast Low-Angle SHot pulse sequence, with gradient spoiling of

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Table 1 Pulse sequences and timing parameters applied in the five studies, A, . . . ,E. TR: repetition time, TE: echo time, TI: inversion time, FA: flip angle, TA: acquisition time Channel no.

Pulse sequence

Included in study

TR [ms]

TE [ms]

1 2 3 4 5

FLASH DESS FISP PSIF MPRAGE

A,B,C,D,E B,C,D,E A,B,C,D,E A,B,C,D,E A,C,D,E

22 26 23 17 18

6 9, 45 10 7 7

remnant transverse magnetization between successive TR intervals (Frahm et al., 1987), is a rapid gradient-echo imaging technique with high signal-to-noise ratio per unit time. This sequence gives strong T1-weighted contrast for short echo times (TE , 10 ms) and with flip angles of 20–458. In this case there is almost no fluid signal, and solid tissue becomes bright with good contrast between gray and white matter. MPRAGE, the Magnetization Prepared RApid Gradient Echo pulse sequence, applies a 1808 pre-pulse followed by an inversion period before data acquisition (Mugler and Brookeman, 1990). The effective inversion period, TI, is the time interval between the 1808 pulse and the central phase-encoding steps. The image contrast between tissues with different T1 relaxation times is determined by TI.

2.1.1.2. PD-weighted pulse sequence. FISP, the Fast Imaging with Steady state Precession pulse sequence, is essentially a FLASH sequence with a rewinder pulse (Oppelt et al., 1986). The flip angle controls the mixing degree of transverse and longitudinal steady state components. It produces images with a relatively high signalto-noise ratio, but low contrast. With small flip angles (5–208) the T1 sensitivity is reduced. A long TR (100–400 ms) and a short TE (5–15 ms) also make the T2 and T2 * effects small. In this situation contrast is primarily dependent on proton spin density. For multispectral studies TR must be shortened substantially to achieve reasonable scan times. 2.1.1.3. T2 -weighted pulse sequences. PSIF, the time-reversed FISP, is a steady-state free precession sequence that gives extra T2-weighting to a FISP sequence (Gyngell, 1988). Fluid will appear bright and solid tissues are usually dark. Moreover, since PSIF (like FISP) is a steady-state technique it is sensitive to motion of proton spins (Chien and Edelman, 1991). Hence, moving fluids do not appear uniformly bright, and vascular pulsations or eye movements during acquisition will lead to motion artifacts projected in the phase-encoding direction. DESS, the Dual Echo in Steady State pulse sequence, combines the free induction decay echo of the FISP sequence and the radiofrequency echo of the PSIF sequence (Redpath and Jones, 1988). Thus, it gives T2weighted images and a high signal of CSF compared to

TI [ms]

FA [deg.]

TA [min:s]

300

30 40 15 30 8

6:02 7:08 6:19 4:41 5:35

other non-fluid tissues. In the present implementation of DESS, both signals are combined.

2.2. Test subjects We used four healthy, male volunteers with no history of disease, aged from 25 to 45 years. All had normal weight and normal hydration throughout the whole experimental period. The volunteers were instructed to keep their head fixed during the imaging session, and head immobilization was facilitated by using foam pads and evacuated polystyrene bags within the head coil to avoid misregistration between the images of successive pulse sequences. Studies A and B were recordings from the same man with an interval of 35 days. Study A included the four pulse sequences PSIF, MPRAGE, FISP and FLASH, while Study B included the four pulse sequences FLASH, DESS, FISP and PSIF. The recording of more than three different 3D pulse sequences in succession results in too long acquisition times for clinical use. Hence, four different pulse sequences were used only in studies A and B to guide in the selection of at most three different 3D pulse sequences for the other studies C, D and E. In these latter studies only the three pulse sequences FLASH, DESS and FISP were used, in this order.

2.2.1. Image registration and signal intensity artifacts The multispectral images were checked for possible misregistration. All checks were done visually by displaying three and three channel images as RGB color images. That way most misregistrations of a few pixels would be seen as narrow bands of distinct color. One study not mentioned above had to be excluded because of misregistrations. Slow movie display in 2D of the recorded 3D channel images was used to visually check the occurrence of signal intensity artifacts. Field inhomogeneities causing signal intensity gradients are more pronounced in gradient echo images than in spin echo images. Such gradients frequently reduce the distances between tissue types in feature space, and should normally be removed. It was not done here to test the robustness of our multispectral analysis method.

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2.3. Statistical classification Even if the 3D image was not isotropic in k-space, zero-filling before reconstruction gave almost isotropic voxels. Since the slice orientation was always sagittal, training samples and signal intensity feature vectors did not need to be identified in all orientations, reducing the problem of anisotropy. Thus, little spatial bias was introduced in the contextual classifier and interpolation artifacts were avoided in the classification.

2.3.1. The training technique To obtain a user-friendly and simple, but accurate method to quantify and visualize the CSF of the brain, detailed manual training on all other tissue types present in the brain and surrounding structures should be avoided. Partitional clustering (Jain and Dubes, 1988) of the voxels in a single 2D slice of the recorded 3D image with subsequent manual labeling of parts of each cluster (Taxt et al., 1992; Taxt and Lundervold, 1994) was selected as the most promising technique compatible with this goal. A 2D slice of the recorded 3D image close to the mid-sagittal plane and including all the available channel images was used for training. The FLASH channel from Study B is shown in Fig. 2. In this slice a mask was drawn manually around the whole head to reduce the number of voxels to be clustered. In Study D a smaller mask was used. The reason for this was to force the clusters to divide into separate tissue types. Using a larger mask, as for the other four studies, white and gray matter were not separated properly. The number of clusters used in the c-means clustering algorithm (Jain and Dubes, 1988) was nine for the multispectral, whole head images. Visual evaluation of c-means segmentation results from the initial training slice, using different number of clusters, gave c 5 9 as an optimal number to match the number of normal tissue types present in the imaged objects, including various connective tissue types and classes representing partial volume effects. Following the clustering, it was possible to assign parts of each cluster to a unique tissue label manually, using anatomical knowledge and the visual context provided by the clusters. The final cluster masks (Fig. 2) were used to estimate the tissue-specific mean values and covariance matrices of the statistical classifier. Time consumption for c-means clustering and interactive training in a single slice was about 3–5 min and requires moderate knowledge of neuroanatomy and tissue distributions in the head. The significance of the various pulse sequence combinations for the classifier performance was estimated using the generalized Mahalanobis distance (Hjort, 1986; Taxt et al., 1990). In rating the various pulse sequence combinations, the sorting criterion was the smallest Mahalanobis distance between tissue types for a given pulse sequence combination. Given that all feature components are approximately normally distributed, a generalized Mahalanobis distance

of about 4.0 between two tissue types represents an expected, approximate error rate of 2.5% (Hjort, 1986). A distance of about 10.0 or more indicates that expected error rate is almost zero. The predictive value of the generalized Mahalanobis distance decreases with increasing deviations from the normality assumption. For all possible feature vector dimensions and all combinations of the available channel images, the Mahalanobis distances between all tissue types in an object were computed.

2.3.2. The 3 D contextual discriminant rule Statistical classification of multispectral 2D MR images in a Bayesian framework with Haslett’s Markov field based contextual classification rule (Taxt and Lundervold, 1994) gives reliable labeling of the normal tissue types of the brain (Taxt and Lundervold, 1994). Therefore, this method was used here also, but generalized to 3D with a first order, 3D neighborhood (Holden et al., 1995; Lundervold et al., 1996). For simplicity non-informative prior probabilities, pc 5 1 /C (c 5 1, . . . ,C) and the default transition probabilities, pc ud 5 (0.1 /(C 2 1)) if c ± d and pc ud 5 0.9 if c 5 d (c, d 5 1, . . . ,C) were selected. Here, C denote the number of tissue classes and pc ud is the probability of having tissue type c in a voxel given that its neighbor have tissue type d. In order to make the comparison of the various classification results simple, no doubt or outlier options were used. The voxels that were classified as CSF were given a uniform blue color, and were superimposed on the gray scale T1-weighted channel 3D image and on the T2weighted 3D channel image. The resulting composite 3D image was inspected as a digital movie of the brain consisting of 128 frames of sagittal 2D images from left ear to right ear. That way, both coarse and fine anatomical details of the CSF labeling could be inspected visually. The 3D classification of the head consumed less than 10 min on a SGI Maximum Impact 195 MHz R10000 workstation with 256 MB RAM. 2.4. Visualization and quantification To visualize the 3D CSF distribution and compute its volume as accurately as possible using the 3D classification results, voxels labeled as CSF extracranially had in some cases to be removed from the CSF classification mask. Since all these mislabeled voxels were located in the eyes and the nasal region they were removed by simple interactive delineation. An efficient recursive implementation of a connectivity algorithm (Cline et al., 1987), with first order neighborhood in 3D was used to form connected components consisting of a given tissue type. For each connected component the algorithm needed a single seed point. This was given manually for each of the three tissue types: gray matter, white matter and CSF. In some of the studies more than one connected component was used to measure the

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total volume of CSF (see below). The several connected components which were frequently formed by labeled CSF voxels in subarachnoid space were located by searching through all connected components of CSF which were first order neighbors to the gray matter or white matter connected components. After having found all connected components, a marching cube algorithm (Lorensen and Cline, 1987) was used to obtain a triangular surface model of the labeled CSF voxels in the ventricular system and in the subarachnoid space, respectively. This mapping from a volume representation to a surface representation, followed by interactive visualization of the CSF compartments was done with the Explorer package running on a Silicon Graphics workstation. The CSF volumes were computed automatically by counting the number of voxels in each part labeled as CSF, and finally multiplying by the voxel volume.

3. Experimental results

3.1. Training 3.1.1. Gray scale channel images Figs. 1(a–d) show the four channel images of the 2D multispectral image section (slice 060 / 128) used for training in Study B. The similarity of the two T2-weighted images (Fig. 1(b,d)) were easily observed. Misregistrations of 2–3 voxels were present in the facial region of both Study A and B. Inside the brain the misregistrations were about a voxel or smaller. Since the primary interest was to compute the intracranial distribution and volume of CSF, these small misregistrations were considered unnecessary to correct. Study B contained a few horizontal artifact stripes caused by movements of the eyes. This was true for studies C, D and E as well. These three latter studies also had clear signal intensity gradients in the inferior temporal lobe region and in the lateral parts of the cerebellum. These artifacts were most pronounced in the T2-weighted DESS images, and were almost certainly caused by the coil effect and magnetic field inhomogeneities induced by the imaged head (Vlaardingerbroek and den Boer, 1996 p. 105). 3.1.2. Tissue-specific statistical distributions For the training slice in each of the five studies, each cluster consisted mostly of voxels containing a single tissue type. Furthermore, the voxels of each cluster usually formed contiguous sheets. When present, the interior parts of these sheets were used when parts of each cluster were assigned a unique tissue label manually (Fig. 2). Table 2 from Study B gives the the gray level intensities for the nine tissue types of the brain and surrounding structures. Partial volume effects probably gave rise to the splitting of connective tissue into three types. The nine

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tissue types of studies A, C, D and E were the same as those of Study B, except that one cluster we have denoted ‘connective tissue’ was considered as CSF in Study A because of its anatomical distribution. The histograms of the nine tissues were fairly unimodal (Fig. 3), and the tissue mean values differed substantially (Table 2). They fitted a multivariate Gaussian distribution reasonably well, and had relatively low standard deviation values (Table 2). The only exceptions were the PSIF histogram of CSF and the connective tissue type 3. These two histograms were also fairly unimodal, but broader than the other histograms. This was reflected in higher standard deviation values (Table 2). These increased variabilities were probably caused by the high sensitivity of the PSIF pulse sequence to pulsations (Chien and Edelman, 1991).

3.1.3. Generalized Mahalanobis distances and pulse sequence selection Comparing the Mahalanobis distances of the various feature vector compositions, the smallest Mahalanobis distance of a feature vector composition was used as the ranking criterion. In Study A, using all the four channels in the multispectral image resulted in the largest Mahalanobis distances (Table 3). Since the four channel image in Study A contained two T1-weighted pulse sequences with good contrast to noise and only one T2-weighted and one PDweighted pulse sequence, the reasonable choice of four pulse sequences for Study B was, therefore, to keep only one T1-weighted pulse sequence and include an additional and less flow-sensitive T2-weighted DESS pulse sequence. The Mahalanobis distances of the resulting four channel multispectral image were all large (Table 3). However, using all four channels in Study A gave very little increase in Mahalanobis distances compared to three channels. Since the four available 3D pulse sequences in succession takes too long time for most clinical examinations, and will also introduce unnecessary registration problems in most patients, three channels seems to be an upper limit in clinical practice. Reducing the feature vector dimension of Study A to three, the T1-weighted MPRAGE, the PDweighted FISP and the T2-weighted PSIF pulse sequence combination gave the largest Mahalanobis distances. For Study B, two three-dimensional feature vectors gave large Mahalanobis distances, although a little smaller than the four-dimensional feature vector (Table 3). The first consisted of the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2-weighted DESS, and the PD-weighted FISP pulse sequences. The second consisted of the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2weighted DESS, and the T2-weighted PSIF pulse sequences. Three observations allowed us to choose the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2-weighted DESS and the PD-weighted FISP pulse sequence combination as the standard for studies C, D and E. First, the T2-weighted PSIF pulse sequence is more sensitive to the fluid flow than the

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Fig. 1. Multispectral sagittal slice image from Study B (slice 60 / 128). (a) T1-weighted FLASH channel. (b) T2-weighted DESS channel. (c) Proton density weighted FISP channel. (d) T2-weighted PSIF channel.

T2-weighted DESS pulse sequence (Chien and Edelman, 1991). This sensitivity may give rise to variable gray level values in flow areas of the resulting image, with a subsequent increased misclassification rate as a consequence. Comparing the T2-weighted DESS images and the T2-weighted PSIF images in movie display clearly showed larger sensitivity to fluid flow of the T2-weighted PSIF pulse sequence in addition to a lower signal-to-noise ratio. The second observation was that using FLASH as the T1-weighted component in a three channel image of this subject (i.e. Study A and B), the Mahalanobis distances

was larger than when using MPRAGE as the T1-weighted channel. Since also the neuroradiologists were routinely using 3D FLASH as a high-resolution 3D T1-weighted technique we selected FLASH instead of MPRAGE, knowing that some studies have shown that MPRAGE is less sensitive to motion than 3D FLASH (e.g. Runge et al., 1991). The third observation was that the Mahalanobis distances of the T1-weighted FLASH and PD-weighted FISP pulse sequence combination were larger than the Mahalanobis distances of the T1-weighted FLASH and T2-weighted PSIF pulse sequence combination (Table 3).

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Fig. 2. Color-coded training masks (Study B) for each of the 9 tissue types (cfr. Table 2). conn1, conn2 and conn3 denote various connective tissues and partial volume tissues, white-m5white matter, gray-m5gray matter, CSF 5cerebrospinal fluid.

The studies C, D and E were used to verify that the feature vector consisting of the pulse sequence combination T1-weighted FLASH, T2-weighted DESS and PDweighted FISP gave large Mahalanobis distances between CSF and the other tissue types (Table 4). In fact, for all Table 2 Tissue-specific parameters. Signal intensity mean values and standard deviation of the 9 tissue classes identified in Study B (cfr. Fig. 2). conn1, conn2 and conn3 denote various connective tissues and partial volume tissues, white-m5white matter, gray-m5gray matter, CSF 5 cerebrospinal fluid Tissue class

No. fv.

FLASH

DESS

FISP

PSIF

muscle fat air-bone conn1 conn2 conn3 white-m gray-m CSF

562 315 1085 313 377 149 732 373 182

112 (10) 264 (37) 8 (5) 44 (13) 103 (16) 43 (13) 149 (12) 99 (12) 48 (23)

64 (7) 50 (13) 9 (6) 36 (8) 48 (9) 74 (18) 113 (10) 123 (10) 212 (34)

128 (11) 123 (30) 10 (8) 55 (17) 66 (19) 98 (18) 189 (17) 179 (17) 145 (46)

52 (18) 148 (38) 10 (8) 80 (45) 43 (18) 151 (89) 108 (21) 129 (21) 240 (106)

tissues except one all Mahalanobis distances to CSF were larger than the corresponding distances in Study B. The exception was one connective tissue type, but the Mahalanobis distances were also quite large for this tissue. Provided that the large Mahalanobis distances in Table 4 are really representative for all voxels in the imaged volumes, a correct classification of almost all CSF voxels is predicted.

3.2. Distribution and volume of CSF 3.2.1. Classification For studies A and B and feature vector dimension two to four, Table 3 was used to choose for classification the pulse sequence combination with the largest Mahalanobis distances. For all 2D image sections of Study A with feature vector dimension three or four the localization of CSF in the ventricular system and in the subarachnoid space corresponded fairly well to the localization of CSF that is known from numerous studies using magnetic resonance (Brant-Zawadzki and Norman, 1987; Arrington,

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Fig. 3. Tissue-specific histograms of the four feature vector components of Study B. Vertical axis: linear scale, normalized using the maximum bin value. Horizontal axis: linear scale, signal intensity range: 0–493.

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Table 3 Generalized Mahalanobis distances from brain CSF obtained after training on a single slice in Study A and Study B, respectively. Chn 1: FLASH, chn 2: DESS, chn 3: FISP, chn 4: PSIF, chn 5: MPRAGE. ‘1’: channel included in multispectral image. ‘0’: channel not included in multispectral image Channels 12345 0 1 0 0

muscle

fat

air-bone

conn1

conn2

conn3

white-m

gray-m

0 0 0 1

0 0 1 0

0 0 0 0

B B B B

3.3 1.8 6.4 3.8

1.8 0.8 6.4 7.0

4.1 4.6 8.7 3.0

2.3 2.9 7.4 0.8

3.3 2.5 6.8 2.8

0.9 1.9 5.1 0.8

2.6 1.8 4.3 5.7

2.4 1.7 3.9 2.9

0 0 1 0 1 1

0110 1010 0 0 10 1100 0100 1000

B B B B B B

4.6 6.9 4.5 6.6 4.7 7.6

2.6 6.6 7.3 6.5 8.5 10.3

9.7 9.3 6.0 9.4 5.0 9.1

5.1 7.6 2.7 7.7 3.2 7.5

6.1 7.4 3.9 7.0 4.4 7.4

2.8 5.2 1.4 5.4 2.0 5.2

2.9 4.9 6.0 4.9 6.0 7.4

2.6 4.5 3.5 4.4 3.2 4.9

0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1

0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1

1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0

A A A B A B B B

6.3 7.1 4.5 7.2 7.4 6.1 7.9 7.9

6.1 6.6 6.3 6.9 7.3 9.3 10.4 11.1

7.9 7.9 5.0 11.3 7.8 10.0 10.0 9.5

6.2 6.7 3.6 8.2 6.8 5.3 7.7 7.8

5.8 5.4 3.9 8.1 5.9 6.5 7.7 7.8

3.2 3.2 1.4 5.4 3.1 2.9 5.2 5.4

6.5 6.6 4.8 5.3 6.4 6.3 7.7 7.5

4.7 4.6 3.3 4.7 4.6 3.7 5.3 5.1

10111 11110

A B

7.6 8.3

7.8 11.5

8.1 11.6

6.9 8.3

6.0 8.5

3.2 5.5

6.7 7.8

4.8 5.4

1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1

1 0 0 0

(Studies A and B)

1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0

1990) and other techniques (e.g. Sobotta and Becher, 1994). However, many voxels of the most superficial layer of gray matter, the vitreous fluid of the eye and parts of the nasal mucus membranes were incorrectly labeled as CSF. The combination of the T2-weighted PSIF and the T1weighted MPRAGE pulse sequences of Study A had the largest Mahalanobis distances for feature vector dimension two. However, in several of the classified 2D sections with this feature vector composition there were a large number of voxels incorrectly labeled as CSF or gray matter. The labeling was not practical to use for quantifying CSF. Classification of Study B with the three-dimensional feature vector consisting of the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2-weighted DESS and the PD-weighted FISP channel images gave excellent results. Similar results were obtained by using the single possible four-dimensional feature vector. The localization of CSF in the ventricular system and in the subarachnoid space corresponded to the localization of CSF that is known from other studies using magnetic resonance (Brant-Zawadzki and Norman, 1987;

Arrington, 1990) and other techniques (e.g. Sobotta and Becher, 1994). Also the fluid inside both eyes and parts of the nasal mucus membranes were labeled as CSF. Plexus choroideus in the lateral ventricles and the third ventricle was labeled as connective tissue. Classification of Study B with the two-dimensional feature vector consisting of the channel images formed by the T1-weighted FLASH and the T2-weighted DESS pulse sequences gave good results. However, they were clearly inferior to those based on a three-dimensional feature vector. The voxels of gray matter formed small, but incorrect protrusions outside the subarachnoid space in the left eye region. On the other hand, the areas labeled as CSF seemed to be too small in the subarachnoid area. In summary, all channels of the three-dimensional feature vector formed by the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2-weighted DESS and the PD-weighted FISP pulse sequences were necessary to give reliable classification results. Unexpectedly, classification of studies C, D and E with this latter three-dimensional feature vector gave mixed

Table 4 Generalized Mahalanobis distances in Studies C, D and E. Feature vector: FLASH, DESS and FISP. Distances from CSF to other tissue types in the head. 105–910 voxels in each tissue mask Study

muscle

fat

air-bone

conn1

conn2

conn3

white-m

gray-m

C D E

9.4 12.0 10.4

12.1 13.4 12.3

10.3 10.9 13.4

9.5 8.3 9.4

6.4 6.6 8.0

9.1 11.6 10.5

10.9 13.1 12.1

7.3 8.0 7.2

mean

10.5

12.6

11.5

9.1

7.0

10.4

12.0

7.5

132

A. Lundervold et al. / Medical Image Analysis 4 (2000) 123 – 136

results. The voxels containing only CSF were correctly labeled in the subarachnoid space over the convexity of the brain, and also inside the ventricle system. Those parts of the ventricles which were filled with plexus choroideus were also correctly labeled as connective tissue. The CSF voxels in the parts of subarachnoid space which surrounded the lower and lateral parts of the temporal lobes and the lateral parts of the cerebellum were misclassified. However, by inspecting the channel images, the cause of the misclassifications were seen to be the observed signal intensity artifacts in all cases. The stripe artifacts due to eye movements in the five studies did not cause misclassifications of voxels with CSF.

3.2.2. Quantification and visualization Forming connected components based on the classification of Study A with feature vector dimension three or four showed that the voxels of gray matter formed a connected component which made small and incorrect protrusions outside the subarachnoid space in the facial region. Thus, the technique of extracting the CSF subarachnoid space by using the neighborhood relationship between subarachnoid CSF labeled voxels and gray matter or white matter labeled voxels could not be used directly. Also the CSF labeled voxels of the the vitreous fluid of the eye and a substantial fraction of the nasal mucus membranes labeled as CSF were parts of the connected components that formed the subarachnoid CSF space. The connecting bridges were false, small protrusions from subarachnoid space of voxels labeled as CSF. Since the extracranial voxels that were incorrectly labeled as CSF were in the facial region of the head, they could still be easily removed from the CSF classification mask by simple interactive manipulation of this mask. That way, a final CSF classification mask was achieved, which was used for the CSF volume calculations (Table 5). Forming connected components based on the classification of Study B with feature vector dimension three or four gave volumes and 3D anatomical distributions that agreed very well with those known from anatomical studies using casts (Arrington, 1990; Nolte, 1993; Sobotta and Becher,

1994) and from interactive and automatic techniques applied to 3D images acquired using 2D pulse sequences ¨ (Hohne and Hanson, 1992; Kikinis et al., 1992; Nolte, 1993; Sobotta and Becher, 1994). Cerebrospinal fluid inside the lateral ventricles and the third ventricle formed a single connected component (Table 5, Fig. 4(a)). Plexus choroideus in the lateral ventricles was labeled as connective tissue. The gray matter formed a single connected component with no extracranial extensions. Thus, the technique of extracting all the CSF labeled subarachnoid space by using the neighborhood relationship between subarachnoid CSF labeled voxels and gray matter or white matter labeled voxels could be used with minimal manual interaction. Using the three-dimensional feature vector, the CSF labeled pixels in the subarachnoid space consisted of a few large and many small connected components (Table 5, Fig. 4(b)). The connected component of the fourth ventricle was connected to one of the connected components belonging to the CSF subarachnoid space, but the connection between the third and the fourth ventricle was broken in the aqueduct. Quite similar results were found using the four-dimensional feature vector, but the total CSF volume was somewhat larger (Table 5). The good agreement of the total brain volume of the same individual obtained with the three or four-dimensional pulse sequence combinations of Study A and Study B 35 days apart is worth noting (Table 5). Forming connected components on the basis of the classification of Study B with the two-dimensional feature vector showed that the voxels of gray matter formed a connected component which made small and incorrect protrusions through the subarachnoid space and into the left eye region. Thus, the technique of extracting the CSF subarachnoid space by using the neighborhood relationship between subarachnoid CSF labeled voxels and gray matter or white matter labeled voxels could not be used. Instead, the manual procedure described above was used to find the CSF anatomical distribution and volumes (Table 5). The subarachnoid CSF volume was more fragmented than expected, indicating that this volume was underestimated.

Table 5 Estimated CSF and total brain volumes. ‘Ventricles’ denotes the lateral ventricles, the 3rd ventricle and the 4th ventricle. Subarachnoid space includes the basal cisterns. Total brain volume includes gray matter, white matter and all CSF Feature vector composition

Study

Ventricles [ml]

Total CSF [ml]

Total brain volume [ml]

PSIF, MPRAGE, FISP PSIF, MPRAGE, FISP, PSIF FLASH, DESS FLASH, DESS, FISP FLASH, DESS, FISP, PSIF FLASH, DESS, FISP FLASH, DESS, FISP FLASH, DESS, FISP

A A B B B C D E

10 a 9a 10 10 b 12 c 25 a 9a 16 a

175 187 116 136 168 172 144 175

1335 1353 1335 1335 1336 1522 1336 1498

a

Lateral ventricles only. The 4th ventricle (0.3 ml). c The 4th ventricle (0.7 ml). b

A. Lundervold et al. / Medical Image Analysis 4 (2000) 123 – 136

133

Fig. 4. Anatomical distribution of CSF in Study B. (a) Lateral ventricles and third ventricle seen from two different viewpoints. (b) Subarachnoid space, basal cisterns and the ventricle system (occluded).

For studies C, D and E and a feature vector dimension of three, the whole volume of intracranial CSF consisted of 2–4 connected components. All CSF voxels with a first order neighborhood to the external surface of gray matter were then considered as a single component. The lateral ventricles were connected and had the same shape as known from other anatomical studies. However, starting from the middle of the brain, the most distal parts of the anterior and posterior horns were sometimes not connected to the central part. By inspecting the channel images this was seen to be due to interruptions caused by plexus choroideus tissue in the ventricles. The fourth ventricle

was not connected to the lateral ventricles or to the subarachnoid space. The connected components of CSF in subarachnoid space extended over the convexity of the brain and had an anatomical correct shape and localization. However, as expected from the classification results, the CSF in the basal parts of the subarachnoid space was almost completely missing. The normal CSF volume of the lateral ventricles and the third ventricle together is reported to be in the range 10–50 ml (Condon et al., 1986; Kohn et al., 1991; DeCarli et al., 1992; Kikinis et al., 1992; Murphy et al., 1992; Nolte, 1993). The estimated CSF volumes of these ventricles

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A. Lundervold et al. / Medical Image Analysis 4 (2000) 123 – 136

were approximately within this range for all the feature vector compositions used here (Table 5). The individual size of plexus choroideus and its localization must be a major factor causing the variability of the results between individuals. The normal total intracranial CSF volume is reported to be about 120–160 ml in young individuals and about 150–220 ml in old persons (Skullerud, 1985; Condon et al., 1986; Filipek et al., 1989; Harris et al., 1991; Kohn et al., 1991; DeCarli et al., 1992; Kikinis et al., 1992; Murphy et al., 1992; Nolte, 1993). Using threeor four-dimensional feature vectors, the estimated subarachnoid volumes were in the upper range of this interval (Table 5). Taking the missing fractions of CSF in the basal parts of the subarachnoid space into consideration, the total CSF volumes estimated in the present volunteers become even somewhat larger. With the most promising two-dimensional feature vector, the subarachnoid volume was below normal (Table 5).

4. Discussion This study has used multispectral analysis of 3D MR images recorded from four human brains to design a simple and user friendly method to quantify and visualize the intracranial CSF anatomical distribution accurately for routine, clinical use. Two multispectral images of the same person with feature vector dimension four (Study A and Study B) was used for multispectral analysis of Mahalanobis distances between CSF and other tissues when channel images of five different fast 3D pulse sequences were obtained. This was used to guide in the selection of at most three different 3D pulse sequences for the remaining recordings. The recording of more than three different 3D pulse sequences resulted in too long acquisition times. The present results strongly indicate that a T1-weighted, a PD-weighted and a T2-weighted channel image can be used to obtain large Mahalanobis distances when the feature vector dimension of the multispectral image is three. However, the choice of which particular pulse sequences to use is critical to obtain low misclassification rates. For example, the Mahalanobis distances for Study A with the three pulse sequences MPRAGE, FISP and PSIF were in the medium range, 3.2–7.9. In contrast, the Mahalanobis distances for Study B with the three pulse sequences FLASH, FISP and DESS were in the high range, 5.1–11.1. Thus, the estimation of the CSF anatomical distribution and volume should be much more reliable using the latter three pulse sequences than the former three. The observed distribution and volume of CSF following classification substantiate this conclusion. The ventricle and subarachnoid CSF volumes of studies B-E with the three-dimensional feature vector consisting of the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2-weighted DESS and the PD-weighted FISP pulse sequences were in good agree-

ment with other studies, although in the upper volume range. Also taking into consideration the good agreement between the spatial extent of the CSF in the upper parts of the brain and its known anatomical distribution, the threedimensional feature vector consisting of the T1-weighted FLASH, the T2-weighted DESS and the PD-weighted FISP pulse sequences becomes a good choice for accurate measurement of CSF volumes based on multispectral analysis of 3D brain images. A potential problem in many practical situations with the recommended set of three pulse sequences is the total acquisition time of about 30 min. This includes initial scout imaging, positioning of the 3D slab, 19 min and 29 s for 3D FLASH, DESS and FISP data acquisition, and a few minutes computer time for image reconstruction. Such a fairly long recording time may give rise to misregistration problems due to patient movements. Some patients can tolerate this imaging procedure without significant head movements (Lundervold et al., 1995a). In practice, most patients will prefer as short examination time as possible. However, none of the available two-channel 3D pulse sequences gave reliable classification results so the total acquisition time can not be reduced. The only way is to try to correct misregistrations between the 3D channel images before the multispectral analysis procedure by using one of several available methods (e.g. Woods et al., 1993; Hajnal et al., 1995; Bedell et al., 1996; Wells III et al., 1996a). To obtain a correct volume and distribution of CSF also including the basal part of the brain, the 3D signal intensity gradients (bias field) associated with the coil effect and the applied magnetic field sensitive gradient echo pulse sequences, have to be removed. Several automated methods to do such signal intensity corrections are available (e.g. Dawant et al., 1993; Wells III et al., 1996b; Guillemaud and Brady, 1997), but none is applied to multispectral 3D acquisitions or is well documented in practice. A simple improvement is to use estimated values for prior probabilities and transition probabilities in the classifier. These probabilities can be estimated based on the training mask (Sæbø et al., 1985). Another likely improvement is to use the posterior probability, calculated for each tissue class in each voxel, for quantification and visualization in stead of the crisp class labels applied here. That way, at least some of the partial volume effects known to be present in the MR images (Santago and Gage, 1993) will be incorporated in the method. The known anatomical distribution and volume of CSF was sufficient to rank the various feature vector compositions and feature vector dimensions for automatic 3D CSF volume quantification and distribution. Note, however, that this approach does only allow a semi-quantitative assessment of the closeness of these automatically found 3D CSF volume distributions to the true 3D CSF volume distribution. To compare the present method in a precise way with other methods for quantification and

A. Lundervold et al. / Medical Image Analysis 4 (2000) 123 – 136

distribution of CSF a manually made gold standard is needed. Making such a gold standard was not part of the present study. In conclusion, this paper shows that some of the fast 3D gradient echo pulse sequences that have become available on conventional clinical scanners can be used to obtain good estimates of brain cerebrospinal fluid anatomical distribution and volume.

Acknowledgements This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway (grants 340.93 / 018 and 390.95 / 028) and Silicon Graphics A / S, Norway. We thank the reviewers for valuable comments.

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