Consistent Detection of Mid-Sagittal Planes for Follow-up MR Brain Studies

摘要

The mid-sagittal plane (MSP) is a commonly used anatomic landmark for standardized MR brain acquisition. In addition to the requirement of accurate detection of the MSP geometry, it is also imperative from clinical point of view to consistently prescribe scan planning for evaluation of pathology process in follow-up studies. In this work, an adaptive technique of scan planning has been developed to enforce the consistency among scans acquired at different time points from the same patient by maximizing image similarity in the proximity of MSP. The geometry parameters of the MSP of current study are optimized by simplex algorithm to achieve better similarity to the reference study. Meanwhile different similarity measures are studied and evaluated within the region of the interest of each MSP. The method is successfully tested on self-reference consistency study by manually setting the reference sagittal image. It is also tested with clinical follow-up studies of MR images acquired from 30 patients. By visual inspection, the adaptive consistency method improves the similarity to the reference images in 22 follow-up studies evidently, while the similarity to the reference images in 7 studies improves slightly. This result demonstrates the efficacy of our method on consistent detection of mid-sagittal planes for follow-up MR brain study.