Hippocampus Segmentation On High Resolution Diffusion MRI

Cory Efird, Samuel Neumann, Kevin G. Solar, Christian Beaulieu, Dana Cobzas

Abstract: We introduce the first hippocampus segmentation method for a novel high resolution (1×1×1mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> ) diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) protocol acquired in 5.5 minutes at 3T. A new augmentation technique uses subsets of the DTI dataset to create mean diffusion weighted images (DWI) with plausible noise and contrast variations. The augmented DWI along with fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) maps are used as inputs to a powerful convolutional neural network architecture. The method is evaluated for robustness using a second diffusion protocol.