Julien Cohen-Adad

Thomas Dagonneau

Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal

Naga Karthik Enamundram

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Co-supervisor :

Sarath Chandar

emvnagakarthik@gmail.com

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Nathan Molinier

PhD - Polytechnique Montréal

Kalum Ost

Collaborating researcher

Simon Queric

Research Intern - Polytechnique Montréal

Abel Salmona Salmona

Research Intern - Polytechnique Montréal

abel.salmona@gmail.com

Julien Thouveny

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Arthur Toulouse

Master's Research - Polytechnique Montréal

Jan Valosek

Postdoctorate - Polytechnique Montréal

Website

Google Scholar

Publications

An 8‐channel Tx dipole and 20‐channel Rx loop coil array for MRI of the cervical spinal cord at 7 Tesla

Nibardo Lopez‐Rios

Kyle M. Gilbert

Daniel Papp

Gaspard Cereza

Alexandru Foias

Deshpande Rangaprakash

Markus W. May

Bastien Guerin

Lawrence L. Wald

Boris Keil

Jason P. Stockmann

Robert L. Barry

The quality of cervical spinal cord images can be improved by the use of tailored radiofrequency (RF) coil solutions for ultrahigh field ima… (see more)ging; however, very few commercial and research 7‐T RF coils currently exist for the spinal cord, and in particular, those with parallel transmission (pTx) capabilities. This work presents the design, testing, and validation of a pTx/Rx coil for the human neck and cervical/upper thoracic spinal cord. The pTx portion is composed of eight dipoles to ensure high homogeneity over this large region of the spinal cord. The Rx portion is made up of twenty semiadaptable overlapping loops to produce high signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) across the patient population. The coil housing is designed to facilitate patient positioning and comfort, while also being tight fitting to ensure high sensitivity. We demonstrate RF shimming capabilities to optimize B1+ uniformity, power efficiency, and/or specific absorption rate efficiency. B1+ homogeneity, SNR, and g‐factor were evaluated in adult volunteers and demonstrated excellent performance from the occipital lobe down to the T4‐T5 level. We compared the proposed coil with two state‐of‐the‐art head and head/neck coils, confirming its superiority in the cervical and upper thoracic regions of the spinal cord. This coil solution therefore provides a convincing platform for producing the high image quality necessary for clinical and research scanning of the upper spinal cord.

2023-07-13

NMR in Biomedicine (published)

Dynamic shimming in the cervical spinal cord for multi-echo gradient-echo imaging at 3 T

Eva Alonso‐Ortiz

Daniel Papp

A. D'Astous

2023-03-01

Neuroimage. Reports (published)

8-channel Tx dipole and 20-channel Rx loop coil array for MRI of the cervical spinal cord at 7 Tesla

Nibardo Lopez Rios

Kyle M. Gilbert

Daniel Papp

Gaspard Cereza

Alexandru Foias

D. Rangaprakash

Markus W. May

Bastien Guerin

Lawrence L. Wald

Boris Keil

Jason P. Stockmann

Robert L. Barry

2023-02-09

bioRxiv (preprint)

Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation with TransCeption: A Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Approach

Reza Azad

Yiwei Jia

Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam

Dorit Merhof

While CNN-based methods have been the cornerstone of medical image segmentation due to their promising performance and robustness, they suff… (see more)er from limitations in capturing long-range dependencies. Transformer-based approaches are currently prevailing since they enlarge the reception field to model global contextual correlation. To further extract rich representations, some extensions of the U-Net employ multi-scale feature extraction and fusion modules and obtain improved performance. Inspired by this idea, we propose TransCeption for medical image segmentation, a pure transformer-based U-shape network featured by incorporating the inception-like module into the encoder and adopting a contextual bridge for better feature fusion. The design proposed in this work is based on three core principles: (1) The patch merging module in the encoder is redesigned with ResInception Patch Merging (RIPM). Multi-branch transformer (MB transformer) adopts the same number of branches as the outputs of RIPM. Combining the two modules enables the model to capture a multi-scale representation within a single stage. (2) We construct an Intra-stage Feature Fusion (IFF) module following the MB transformer to enhance the aggregation of feature maps from all the branches and particularly focus on the interaction between the different channels of all the scales. (3) In contrast to a bridge that only contains token-wise self-attention, we propose a Dual Transformer Bridge that also includes channel-wise self-attention to exploit correlations between scales at different stages from a dual perspective. Extensive experiments on multi-organ and skin lesion segmentation tasks present the superior performance of TransCeption compared to previous work. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/mindflow-institue/TransCeption.

2023-01-25

ArXiv (preprint)

Label fusion and training methods for reliable representation of inter-rater uncertainty

Andreanne Lemay

Charley Gros

Enamundram Naga Karthik

2023-01-18

Machine Learning for Biomedical Imaging (published)

HiFormer: Hierarchical Multi-scale Representations Using Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation

Moein Heidari

Amirhossein Kazerouni

Milad Soltany

Reza Azad

Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam

Dorit Merhof

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the consensus for medical image segmentation tasks. However, they suffer from the limitation … (see more)in modeling long-range dependencies and spatial correlations due to the nature of convolution operation. Although transformers were first developed to address this issue, they fail to capture low-level features. In contrast, it is demonstrated that both local and global features are crucial for dense prediction, such as segmenting in challenging contexts. In this paper, we propose HiFormer, a novel method that efficiently bridges a CNN and a transformer for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we design two multi-scale feature representations using the seminal Swin Transformer module and a CNN-based encoder. To secure a fine fusion of global and local features obtained from the two aforementioned representations, we propose a Double-Level Fusion (DLF) module in the skip connection of the encoder-decoder structure. Extensive experiments on various medical image segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HiFormer over other CNN-based, transformer-based, and hybrid methods in terms of computational complexity, quantitative and qualitative results. Our code is publicly available at GitHub.

2023-01-02

2023 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) (published)

Contrast-agnostic deep learning–based registration pipeline: Validation in spinal cord multimodal MRI data

E. Beal

2023-01-01

Aperture Neuro (published)

Histology-informed automatic parcellation of white matter tracts in the rat spinal cord

Harris Nami

Christian S. Perone

The white matter is organized into “tracts” or “bundles,” which connect different parts of the central nervous system. Knowing where… (see more) these tracts are located in each individual is important for understanding the cause of potential sensorial, motor or cognitive deficits and for developing appropriate treatments. Traditionally, tracts are found using tracer injection, which is a difficult, slow and poorly scalable technique. However, axon populations from a given tract exhibit specific characteristics in terms of morphometrics and myelination. Hence, the delineation of tracts could, in principle, be done based on their morphometry. The objective of this study was to generate automatic parcellation of the rat spinal white matter tracts using the manifold information from scanning electron microscopy images of the entire spinal cord. The axon morphometrics (axon density, axon diameter, myelin thickness and g-ratio) were computed pixelwise following automatic axon segmentation using AxonSeg. The parcellation was based on an agglomerative clustering algorithm to group the tracts. Results show that axon morphometrics provide sufficient information to automatically identify some white matter tracts in the spinal cord, however, not all tracts were correctly identified. Future developments of microstructure quantitative MRI even bring hope for a personalized clustering of white matter tracts in each individual patient. The generated atlas and the associated code can be found at https://github.com/neuropoly/tract-clustering.

2022-11-29

Frontiers in Neuroanatomy (published)

Shimming toolbox: An open‐source software toolbox for <scp>B0</scp> and <scp>B1</scp> shimming in MRI

Alexandre D'Astous

Gaspard Cereza

Daniel Papp

Kyle M. Gilbert

Jason P. Stockmann

Eva Alonso‐Ortiz

2022-11-28

Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (published)

Intervertebral Disc Labeling With Learning Shape Information, A Look Once Approach

Reza Azad

Moein Heidari

Ehsan Adeli

Dorit Merhof

Accurate and automatic segmentation of intervertebral discs from medical images is a critical task for the assessment of spine-related disea… (see more)ses such as osteoporosis, vertebral fractures, and intervertebral disc herniation. To date, various approaches have been developed in the literature which routinely relies on detecting the discs as the primary step. A disadvantage of many cohort studies is that the localization algorithm also yields false-positive detections. In this study, we aim to alleviate this problem by proposing a novel U-Net-based structure to predict a set of candidates for intervertebral disc locations. In our design, we integrate the image shape information (image gradients) to encourage the model to learn rich and generic geometrical information. This additional signal guides the model to selectively emphasize the contextual representation and suppress the less discriminative features. On the post-processing side, to further decrease the false positive rate, we propose a permutation invariant 'look once' model, which accelerates the candidate recovery procedure. In comparison with previous studies, our proposed approach does not need to perform the selection in an iterative fashion. The proposed method was evaluated on the spine generic public multi-center dataset and demonstrated superior performance compared to previous work. We have provided the implementation code in https://github.com/rezazad68/intervertebral-lookonce

2022-09-16

Predictive Intelligence in Medicine (published)

Relationship Between Arterial Stiffness Index, Pulse Pressure, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Markers of White Matter Integrity: A UK Biobank Study

Atef Badji

Hélène Girouard

2022-06-21

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (published)

NeoRS: A Neonatal Resting State fMRI Data Preprocessing Pipeline

Vicente Enguix

Jeanette Kenley

David Luck

Gregory Anton Lodygensky

Resting state functional MRI (rsfMRI) has been shown to be a promising tool to study intrinsic brain functional connectivity and assess its … (see more)integrity in cerebral development. In neonates, where functional MRI is limited to very few paradigms, rsfMRI was shown to be a relevant tool to explore regional interactions of brain networks. However, to identify the resting state networks, data needs to be carefully processed to reduce artifacts compromising the interpretation of results. Because of the non-collaborative nature of the neonates, the differences in brain size and the reversed contrast compared to adults due to myelination, neonates can’t be processed with the existing adult pipelines, as they are not adapted. Therefore, we developed NeoRS, a rsfMRI pipeline for neonates. The pipeline relies on popular neuroimaging tools (FSL, AFNI, and SPM) and is optimized for the neonatal brain. The main processing steps include image registration to an atlas, skull stripping, tissue segmentation, slice timing and head motion correction and regression of confounds which compromise functional data interpretation. To address the specificity of neonatal brain imaging, particular attention was given to registration including neonatal atlas type and parameters, such as brain size variations, and contrast differences compared to adults. Furthermore, head motion was scrutinized, and motion management optimized, as it is a major issue when processing neonatal rsfMRI data. The pipeline includes quality control using visual assessment checkpoints. To assess the effectiveness of NeoRS processing steps we used the neonatal data from the Baby Connectome Project dataset including a total of 10 neonates. NeoRS was designed to work on both multi-band and single-band acquisitions and is applicable on smaller datasets. NeoRS also includes popular functional connectivity analysis features such as seed-to-seed or seed-to-voxel correlations. Language, default mode, dorsal attention, visual, ventral attention, motor and fronto-parietal networks were evaluated. Topology found the different analyzed networks were in agreement with previously published studies in the neonate. NeoRS is coded in Matlab and allows parallel computing to reduce computational times; it is open-source and available on GitHub (https://github.com/venguix/NeoRS). NeoRS allows robust image processing of the neonatal rsfMRI data that can be readily customized to different datasets.

2022-06-17

Frontiers in Neuroinformatics (published)