Multi-Contrast Computed Tomography Atlas of Healthy Pancreas

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-resolution CT atlas of the pancreas across multiple contrasts, utilizing deep learning and hierarchical registration to improve anatomical alignment and facilitate population-wide pancreatic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel deep learning-based preprocessing and registration pipeline for creating a detailed pancreas atlas from multi-contrast CT scans.

Findings

Achieved the best registration performance with DEEDs affine and non-rigid registration.

External evaluation yielded a 0.504 Dice score for pancreas label transfer.

Qualitative mapping clearly delineates pancreas boundaries across contrast phases.

Abstract

With the substantial diversity in population demographics, such as differences in age and body composition, the volumetric morphology of pancreas varies greatly, resulting in distinctive variations in shape and appearance. Such variations increase the difficulty at generalizing population-wide pancreas features. A volumetric spatial reference is needed to adapt the morphological variability for organ-specific analysis. Here, we proposed a high-resolution computed tomography (CT) atlas framework specifically optimized for the pancreas organ across multi-contrast CT. We introduce a deep learning-based pre-processing technique to extract the abdominal region of interests (ROIs) and leverage a hierarchical registration pipeline to align the pancreas anatomy across populations. Briefly, DEEDs affine and non-rigid registration are performed to transfer patient abdominal volumes to a fixed high-resolution atlas template. To generate and evaluate the pancreas atlas template, multi-contrast modality CT scans of 443 subjects (without reported history of pancreatic disease, age: 15-50 years old) are processed. Comparing with different registration state-of-the-art tools, the combination of DEEDs affine and non-rigid registration achieves the best performance for the pancreas label transfer across all contrast phases. We further perform external evaluation with another research cohort of 100 de-identified portal venous scans with 13 organs labeled, having the best label transfer performance of 0.504 Dice score in unsupervised setting. The qualitative representation (e.g., average mapping) of each phase creates a clear boundary of pancreas and its distinctive contrast appearance. The deformation surface renderings across scales (e.g., small to large volume) further illustrate the generalizability of the proposed atlas template.