Background: Glioblastoma is the most aggressive adult primary brain cancer, characterized by significant heterogeneity, posing challenges for patient management, treatment planning, and clinical trial stratification.
Methods: We developed a highly reproducible, personalized prognostication and clinical subgrouping system using machine learning (ML) on routine clinical data, MRI, and molecular measures from 2,838 demographically diverse patients across 22 institutions and 3 continents. Patients were stratified into favorable, intermediate, and poor prognostic subgroups (I, II, III) using Kaplan-Meier analysis (Cox proportional model and hazard ratios [HR]).
Background: Brain ageing is highly heterogeneous, as it is driven by a variety of normal and neuropathological processes. These processes may differentially affect structural and functional brain ageing across individuals, with more pronounced ageing (older brain age) during midlife being indicative of later development of dementia. Here, we examined whether brain-ageing heterogeneity in unimpaired older adults related to neurodegeneration, different cognitive trajectories, genetic and amyloid-beta (Aβ) profiles, and to predicted progression to Alzheimer's disease (AD).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain aging is a complex process influenced by various lifestyle, environmental, and genetic factors, as well as by age-related and often co-existing pathologies. MRI and, more recently, AI methods have been instrumental in understanding the neuroanatomical changes that occur during aging in large and diverse populations. However, the multiplicity and mutual overlap of both pathologic processes and affected brain regions make it difficult to precisely characterize the underlying neurodegenerative profile of an individual from an MRI scan.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of biomarkers for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is crucial for developing potential therapeutic treatments. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a well-established tool used to detect β-amyloid (Aβ) plaques in the brain. Previous studies have shown that cross-sectional biomarkers can predict cognitive decline (Schindler et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2023
Normal and pathologic neurobiological processes influence brain morphology in coordinated ways that give rise to patterns of structural covariance (PSC) across brain regions and individuals during brain aging and diseases. The genetic underpinnings of these patterns remain largely unknown. We apply a stochastic multivariate factorization method to a diverse population of 50,699 individuals (12 studies and 130 sites) and derive data-driven, multi-scale PSCs of regional brain size.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe circulation of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is essential for maintaining brain homeostasis and clearance, and impairments in its flow can lead to various brain disorders. Recent studies have shown that CSF circulation can be interrogated using low b-value diffusion magnetic resonance imaging ( dMRI). Nevertheless, the spatial organization of intracranial CSF flow dynamics remains largely elusive.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The Centiloid (CL) project was developed to harmonize the quantification of amyloid beta (Aβ) positron emission tomography (PET) scans to a unified scale. The CL neocortical mask was defined using C Pittsburgh compound B (PiB), overlooking potential differences in regional distribution among Aβ tracers. We created a universal mask using an independent dataset of five Aβ tracers, and investigated its impact on inter-tracer agreement, tracer variability, and group separation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: While the T2-FLAIR mismatch sign is highly specific for isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)-mutant, 1p/19q-noncodeleted astrocytomas among lower-grade gliomas, its utility in WHO grade 4 gliomas is not well-studied. We derived the partial T2-FLAIR mismatch sign as an imaging biomarker for IDH mutation in WHO grade 4 gliomas.
Methods: Preoperative MRI scans of adult WHO grade 4 glioma patients (n = 2165) from the multi-institutional ReSPOND (Radiomics Signatures for PrecisiON Diagnostics) consortium were analyzed.
The translation of AI-generated brain metastases (BM) segmentation into clinical practice relies heavily on diverse, high-quality annotated medical imaging datasets. The BraTS-METS 2023 challenge has gained momentum for testing and benchmarking algorithms using rigorously annotated internationally compiled real-world datasets. This study presents the results of the segmentation challenge and characterizes the challenging cases that impacted the performance of the winning algorithms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: IDH mutation and 1p/19q codeletion status are important prognostic markers for glioma that are currently determined using invasive procedures. Our goal was to develop artificial intelligence-based methods to noninvasively determine molecular alterations from MRI.
Methods: Pre-operative MRI scans of 2648 glioma patients were collected from Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM; = 835) and publicly available Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS; = 378), LGG 1p/19q ( = 159), Ivy Glioblastoma Atlas Project (Ivy GAP; = 41), The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA; = 461), and the Erasmus Glioma Database (EGD; = 774) datasets.
Purpose: Efforts to use growing volumes of clinical imaging data to generate tumor evaluations continue to require significant manual data wrangling, owing to data heterogeneity. Here, we propose an artificial intelligence-based solution for the aggregation and processing of multisequence neuro-oncology MRI data to extract quantitative tumor measurements.
Materials And Methods: Our end-to-end framework (1) classifies MRI sequences using an ensemble classifier, (2) preprocesses the data in a reproducible manner, (3) delineates tumor tissue subtypes using convolutional neural networks, and (4) extracts diverse radiomic features.
Background And Purpose: Automated volumetric analysis of structural MR imaging allows quantitative assessment of brain atrophy in neurodegenerative disorders. We compared the brain segmentation performance of the AI-Rad Companion brain MR imaging software against an in-house FreeSurfer 7.1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisease heterogeneity has been a critical challenge for precision diagnosis and treatment, especially in neurologic and neuropsychiatric diseases. Many diseases can display multiple distinct brain phenotypes across individuals, potentially reflecting disease subtypes that can be captured using MRI and machine learning methods. However, biological interpretability and treatment relevance are limited if the derived subtypes are not associated with genetic drivers or susceptibility factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModern neuro-oncology workflows are driven by large collections of high-dimensional MRI data obtained using varying acquisition protocols. The concomitant heterogeneity of this data makes extensive manual curation and pre-processing imperative prior to algorithmic use. The limited efforts invested towards automating this curation and processing are fragmented, do not encompass the entire workflow, or still require significant manual intervention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlioma is the most common form of brain tumor with a high degree of heterogeneity in imaging characteristics, treatment-response, and survival rate. An important factor causing this heterogeneity is the mutation of isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) enzyme. The current clinical gold-standard for identifying IDH mutation status involves invasive procedures that involve risk, may fail to capture intra-tumoral spatial heterogeneity or can be inaccessible in low-resource settings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The Centiloid scale was developed to harmonise the quantification of β-amyloid (Aβ) PET images across tracers, scanners, and processing pipelines. However, several groups have reported differences across tracers and scanners even after centiloid conversion. In this study, we aim to evaluate the impact of different pre and post-processing harmonisation steps on the robustness of longitudinal Centiloid data across three large international cohort studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has significantly threatened the health and well-being of humanity. Contact tracing (CT) as an important non-pharmaceutical intervention is essential to containing the spread of such an infectious disease. However, current CT solutions are fragmented with limited use of sensing and computing technologies in a scalable framework.
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