? This application for competing renewal aims to continue ongoing work on automated segmentation of vessels and brain tumors from MR images. Previous funding has resulted in over 30 refereed publications, three commercial licensures/sales, and software used within multiple applications by multiple institutions. The current proposal aims to continue this work with focus upon a novel area ripe for development-the diagnosis and staging of disease based upon a statistical analysis of vessel shape. The driving clinical problem is that of assessing tumor malignancy. Despite advances in imaging technology, non-invasive differentiation of benign from malignant tumors remains difficult. An important observation made by those working from histological section is that vessels associated with malignancy possess distinctive shape abnormalities. Our preliminary data suggest that these vessel shape abnormalities are NOT restricted to tiny vessels at the capillary level, but also extend to larger vessels that can be delineated from high-resolution, in vivo imaging studies. The method involves a statistical comparison of regional measures of vessel shape in each test subject to that of the shapes of vessels in a similar region of an atlas of healthy subjects. The region of interest is that defined by tumor segmentation.
Specific aims are to: 1) Fully automate our current vessel and tumor segmentation methods. 2) Develop and evaluate a new method for fully deformable, diffeomorphic, multi-modal atlas formation. 3) Create an atlas of healthy vascular anatomy under the rules developed by Specific Aim 2. 4) Extend our methods of measuring vessel shape and to evaluate the approach for assessing tumor activity/malignancy via four clinical studies. Although this proposal focuses upon brain, the method is applicable to the assessment of malignancy in any anatomical location. Furthermore, although this proposal focuses upon cancer, the general method is applicable to the noninvasive diagnosis and staging of the multiple diseases that affect blood vessels, including hypertension, diabetes, the vasculopathies, and many other pathological states. ? ?

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01EB000219-11
Application #
7458770
Study Section
Biomedical Imaging Technology Study Section (BMIT)
Program Officer
Haller, John W
Project Start
1997-02-15
Project End
2010-06-30
Budget Start
2008-07-01
Budget End
2010-06-30
Support Year
11
Fiscal Year
2008
Total Cost
$480,019
Indirect Cost
Name
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Department
Surgery
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
608195277
City
Chapel Hill
State
NC
Country
United States
Zip Code
27599
Freedman, Rachel A; Bullitt, Elizabeth; Sun, Lixian et al. (2011) A phase II study of sagopilone (ZK 219477; ZK-EPO) in patients with breast cancer and brain metastases. Clin Breast Cancer 11:376-83
Ha, Linh; Prastawa, Marcel; Gerig, Guido et al. (2010) Image registration driven by combined probabilistic and geometric descriptors. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv 13:602-9
Bullitt, Elizabeth; Zeng, Donglin; Mortamet, Benedicte et al. (2010) The effects of healthy aging on intracerebral blood vessels visualized by magnetic resonance angiography. Neurobiol Aging 31:290-300
Bullitt, E; Rahman, F N; Smith, J K et al. (2009) The effect of exercise on the cerebral vasculature of healthy aged subjects as visualized by MR angiography. AJNR Am J Neuroradiol 30:1857-63
Gouttard, Sylvain; Prastawa, Marcel; Bullitt, Elizabeth et al. (2009) Constrained data decomposition and regression for analyzing healthy aging from fiber tract diffusion properties. Med Image Comput Comput Assist Interv 12:321-8
Prastawa, Marcel; Bullitt, Elizabeth; Gerig, Guido (2009) Simulation of brain tumors in MR images for evaluation of segmentation efficacy. Med Image Anal 13:297-311
Chen, Yasheng; An, Hongyu; Zhu, Hongtu et al. (2009) White matter abnormalities revealed by diffusion tensor imaging in non-demented and demented HIV+ patients. Neuroimage 47:1154-62
Bullitt, Elizabeth; Ewend, Matthew; Vredenburgh, James et al. (2009) Computerized assessment of vessel morphological changes during treatment of glioblastoma multiforme: report of a case imaged serially by MRA over four years. Neuroimage 47 Suppl 2:T143-51
Lin, Nancy U; Carey, Lisa A; Liu, Minetta C et al. (2008) Phase II trial of lapatinib for brain metastases in patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer. J Clin Oncol 26:1993-9
Budin, Francois; Zeng, Donglin; Ghosh, Arpita et al. (2008) Preventing facial recognition when rendering MR images of the head in three dimensions. Med Image Anal 12:229-39

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