David Ellis

• University of Nebraska Medical Center

Objectives The shape is commonly used to describe the objects. State-of-the-art algorithms in medical imaging are predominantly diverging from computer vision, where voxel grids, meshes, point clouds, and implicit surface models are used. This is seen from the growing popularity of ShapeNet (51,300 models) and Princeton ModelNet (127,915 models). H...

Background: Patients undergoing brain tumor resection experience neurological and cognitive (i.e., neurocognitive) changes reflected in altered performance on neuropsychological tests. These changes can be difficult to explain or predict. Brain connectivity, measured with neuroimaging, offers one potential model for examining these changes. In this...

Designing implants for large and complex cranial defects is a challenging task, even for professional designers. Current efforts on automating the design process focused mainly on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which have produced state-of-the-art results on reconstructing synthetic defects. However, existing CNN-based methods have been diffi...

Background: Patients undergoing brain tumor resection experience changes to their neurocognitive abilities, many of which can be difficult to predict. We hypothesized that changes in brain connectivity could predict changes in neurocognitive functioning, demonstrating the potential for brain connectivity aware surgical planning to provide enhanced...

We present MedShapeNet, a large collection of anatomical shapes (e.g., bones, organs, vessels) and 3D surgical instrument models. Prior to the deep learning era, the broad application of statistical shape models (SSMs) in medical image analysis is evidence that shapes have been commonly used to describe medical data. Nowadays, however, state-of-the...

Cranial implants are commonly used for surgical repair of craniectomy-induced skull defects. These implants are usually generated offline and may require days to weeks to be available. An automated implant design process combined with onsite manufacturing facilities can guarantee immediate implant availability and avoid secondary intervention. To a...

International benchmarking competitions have become fundamental for the comparative performance assessment of image analysis methods. However, little attention has been given to investigating what can be learnt from these competitions. Do they really generate scientific progress? What are common and successful participation strategies? What makes a...

Introduction: Growing evidence indicates fractal analysis (FA) has potential as a computational tool to assess tumor microvasculature in glioblastoma (GBM). As fractal parameters of microvasculature have shown to be reliable quantitative biomarkers in brain tumors, there has been similar success in measuring the architecture of tumor tissue using...

Designing implants for large and complex cranial defects is a challenging task, even for professional designers. Current efforts on automating the design process focused mainly on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which have produced state-of-the-art results on reconstructing synthetic defects. However, existing CNN-based methods have been diffi...

Accurate individual functional mapping of task activations is a potential tool for biomarker discovery and is critically important for clinical care. While structural imaging does not directly map task activation, we hypothesized that structural imaging contains information that can accurately predict variations in task activation between individua...

Designing implants for large and complex cranial defects is a challenging task, even for professional designers. Current efforts on automating the design process focused mainly on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which have produced state-of-the-art results on reconstructing synthetic defects. However, existing CNN-based methods have been diffi...

As part of the 2021 MICCAI AutoImplant Challenge, CT scans from 11 patients who had undergone cranioplasty using artificial implants were collected. Images of the reconstructed defective skulls before cranioplasty for these patients were shared with participating teams. Three teams submitted cranial implant designs. An experienced neurosurgeon eval...

As part of the 2021 MICCAI AutoImplant Challenge, CT scans from 11 patients who had undergone cranioplasty using artificial implants were collected. Images of the reconstructed defective skulls before cranioplasty for these patients were shared with participating teams. Three teams submitted cranial implant designs. An experienced neurosurgeon eval...

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the MICCAI 2020 AutoImplant Challenge1. The approaches and publications submitted and accepted within the challenge will be summarized and reported, highlighting common algorithmic trends and algorithmic diversity. Furthermore, the evaluation results will be presented, compared and dis...

Automatic brain segmentation has the potential to save time and resources for researchers and clinicians. We aimed to improve upon previously proposed methods by implementing the U-Net model and trialing various modifications to the training and inference strategies. The trials were performed and tested on the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation da...

Cranioplasty is the surgical process where a skull defect resulting from previous surgery or injury is repaired using an implant that restores the original protective and aesthetic function of the skull. Implications range from decompressive craniectomies to performing brain surgery. Although the patient’s autologous bone is routinely used as the i...

Automatic cranial implant design can save clinicians time and resources by computing the implant shape and size from a single image of a defective skull. We aimed to improve upon previously proposed deep learning methods by augmenting the training data set using transformations that warped the images into different shapes and orientations. The tran...

Accurate individual functional mapping of task activations is a potential tool for biomarker discovery and is critically important for clinical care. While structural imaging does not directly map task activation, we hypothesized that structural imaging contains information that can accurately predict variations in task activation between individua...

Objective: By looking at how the accuracy of preoperative brain mapping methods vary according to differences in the distance from the activation clusters used for the analysis, the present study aimed to elucidate how preoperative functional neuroimaging may be used in such a way that maximizes the mapping accuracy. Methods: The eloquent functi...

A fundamental assumption of neuroscience is that brain function is determined by brain structure. Even in healthy populations, both brain structure and brain function vary between individuals and groups. We hypothesize that individual and group differences in functional brain activation can be predicted by localized structural patterns of diffusivi...