Yiming Xiao

Concordia University Montreal · Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective surgical therapy to treat Parkinson's disease (PD). Conventional methods employ standard atlas coordinates to target the STN, which, along with the adjacent red nucleus (RN) and substantia nigra (SN), are not well visualized on conventional T1w MRIs. However, the positions and s...

Transcranial Doppler (TCD) sonography is a special ultra- sound (US) technique that can image and measure the blood flow within certain cerebral blood vessels through bone windows of the human skull. As a relatively inexpensive and portable medical imaging modality, it has shown great applications in the diagnosis and monitoring of a range of neuro...

Purpose: As an inexpensive, noninvasive, and portable clinical imaging modality, ultrasound (US) has been widely employed in many interventional procedures for monitoring potential tissue deformation, surgical tool placement, and locating surgical targets. The application requires the spatial mapping between 2D US images and 3D coordinates of the...

Purpose: The advancement of medical image processing techniques, such as image registration, can effectively help improve the accuracy and efficiency of brain tumor surgeries. However, it is often challenging to validate these techniques with real clinical data due to the rarity of such publicly available repositories. Acquisition and validation...

Parkinson׳s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that primarily affects the motor functions of the patients. Research and surgical treatment of PD (e.g., deep brain stimulation) often require human brain atlases for structural identification or as references for anatomical normalization. However, two pitfalls exist for many current atlases u...

While mastery of neuroanatomy is important for the investigation of the brain, there is an increasing interest in exploring the neural pathways to better understand the roles of neural circuitry in brain functions. To tackle the limitations of traditional 2D-display-based neuronavigation software in intuitively visualizing complex 3D anatomies, sev...

PurposeCollateral evaluation is typically done using visual inspection of cerebral images and thus suffers from intra- and inter-rater variability. Large open databases of ischemic stroke patients are rare, limiting the use of deep learning methods in treatment decision-making.Methods We adapted a pre-trained EfficientNet B0 network through transfe...

Ultrasound (US) imaging is a paramount modality in many image-guided surgeries and percutaneous interventions, thanks to its high portability, temporal resolution, and cost-efficiency. However, due to its imaging principles, US is often noisy and difficult to interpret. Appropriate image processing can greatly enhance the applicability of the imagi...

Background – There is an increasing interest in assessing paraspinal morphology and composition in relation to low back pain (LBP). However, variations in methods and segmentation protocols contribute to the inconsistent findings in the literature. We present an on-line resource, the ParaspInaL muscLe segmentAtion pRoject (PILLAR , https://projectp...

While virtual-reality (VR) has shown great promise in radiological tasks, effective user-interaction strategies that can improve efficiency and ergonomics are still under-explored and systematic evaluations of VR interaction techniques in the context of complex anatomical models are rare. Therefore, our study aims to identify the most effective int...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder affecting regions such as the substantia nigra (SN), red nucleus (RN) and locus coeruleus (LC). Processing MRI data from patients with PD requires anatomical structural references for spatial normalization and structural segmentation. Extending our previous work (Xiao et al., 2015/17)...

Purpose: In brain tumor surgery, tissue shift (called brain shift) can move the surgical target and invalidate the surgical plan. A cost-effective and flexible tool, intra-operative ultrasound (iUS) with robust image registration algorithms can effectively track brain shift to ensure surgical outcomes and safety. Methods: We proposed to employ a...

Image registration is a fundamental medical image analysis task, and a wide variety of approaches have been proposed. However, only a few studies have comprehensively compared medical image registration approaches on a wide range of clinically relevant tasks. This limits the development of registration methods, the adoption of research advances int...

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is a potentially life-threatening emergency due to various causes. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of ICH is critical to deliver timely treatments and improve patients’ survival rates. Although deep learning techniques have become the state-of-the-art in medical image processing and analysis, large training datasets with...

Purpose: Diffeomorphic image registration is essential in many medical imaging applications. Several registration algorithms of such type have been proposed, but primarily for intra-contrast alignment. Currently, efficient inter-modal/contrast diffeomorphic registration, which is vital in numerous applications, remains a challenging task. Methods...

Recent studies have associated morphological and composition changes in paraspinal muscles with low back pain (LBP), which is the most common, but poorly understood musculoskeletal disorder in adults. Accurate paraspinal muscle segmentation from MRI is crucial to enable new image-based biomarkers for the diagnosis and prognosis of LBP. Manual segme...

Purpose: Diffeomorphic image registration is essential in many medical imaging applications. Several registration algorithms of such type have been proposed, but primarily for intra-contrast alignment. Currently, efficient inter-modal/contrast diffeomorphic registration, which is vital in numerous applications, remains a challenging task. Methods:...

Purpose: Registration and segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) and ultrasound (US) images play an essential role in surgical planning and resection of brain tumors. However, validating these techniques is challenging due to the scarcity of publicly accessible sources with high-quality ground truth information. To this end, we propose a unique an...

Segmentation of the thoracic region and breast tissues is crucial for analyzing and diagnosing the presence of breast masses. This paper introduces a medical image segmentation architecture that aggregates two neural networks based on the state-of-the-art nnU-Net. Additionally, this study proposes a polyvinyl alcohol cryogel (PVA-C) breast phantom,...

Parkinsons disease (PD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder affecting regions such as the substantia nigra (SN), red nucleus (RN) and locus coeruleus (LC). Processing MRI data from patients with PD requires anatomical structural references for spatial normalization and structural segmentation. Extending our previous work [1][2], we present mult...

To date few studies have comprehensively compared medical image registration approaches on a wide-range of complementary clinically relevant tasks. This limits the adoption of advances in research into practice and prevents fair benchmarks across competing approaches. Many newer learning-based methods have been explored within the last five years,...

Clinical assessments are an integral part of the care and management of Parkinson’s disease, but full spectral assessments are difficult to obtain consistently, especially at follow-up visits. To better understand the etiology and pathogenesis of the disease and to offer accurate prognosis and tailored treatment plans, data-driven computational met...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective surgical treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The procedure requires precise placement of a stimulation electrode into the therapeutic target while avoiding vital anatomies (e.g. blood vessels) to prevent surgical risks. Therefore, multi-contrast imaging data are often employed to capture full anatomical d...

In brain tumor resection, soft tissue shift (called brain shift) can displace the surgical target and render the surgical plan invalid. Intra-operative ultrasound (iUS) with robust image registration algorithms can effectively correct brain shift to ensure quality of resection and patient safety. Herein, we proposed a novel technique to automatical...

Growing evidence suggests an association of lumbar paraspinal muscle morphology with low back pain (LBP) and lumbar pathologies. Unilateral spinal disorders provide unique models to study this association, with implications for diagnosis, prognosis, and management. Statistical shape analysis is a technique that can identify signature shape variatio...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by a range of motor and nonmotor symptoms, often with the motor dysfunction initiated unilaterally. Knowledge regarding disease‐related alterations in white matter pathways can effectively help improve the understanding of the disease and propose targeted tre...

Presents corrections to the above named paper.

PurposeAccurate multimodal registration of intraoperative ultrasound (US) and preoperative computed tomography (CT) is a challenging problem. Construction of public datasets of US and CT images can accelerate the development of such image registration techniques. This can help ensure the accuracy and safety of spinal surgeries using image-guided su...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by a range of motor and non-motor symptoms, often with the motor dysfunction initiated unilaterally. Knowledge regarding disease-related alterations in white matter pathways can effectively help improve the understanding of the disease and propose targeted tr...

Assessment of collateral circulation in ischemic stroke, which can identify patients for the most appropriate treatment strategies, is currently conducted with visual inspection by a radiologist. Yet numerous studies have shown that visual inspection suffers from inter and intra-rater variability. We present an automatic evaluation of collaterals u...

The zona incerta (ZI) is a small gray matter region of the deep brain first identified in the 19th century, yet direct in vivo visualization and characterization has remained elusive. Noninvasive detection of the ZI and surrounding region could be critical to further our understanding of this widely connected but poorly understood deep brain region...

PurposeSufficient collateral blood supply is crucial for favorable outcomes with endovascular treatment. The current practice of collateral scoring relies on visual inspection and thus can suffer from inter and intra-rater inconsistency. We present a robust and automatic method to score cerebral collateral blood supply to aid ischemic stroke treatm...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an effective therapy as an alternative to pharmaceutical treatments for Parkinson's disease (PD). Aside from factors such as instrumentation, treatment plans, and surgical protocols, the success of the procedure depends heavily on the accurate placement of the electrode within the optimal therapeutic targets while av...

The zona incerta (ZI) is a small deep brain region first identified in the 19th century, yet direct in vivo visualization and characterization has remained elusive. Noninvasive detection is critical to further our understanding of this widely connected but poorly understood region and could contribute to the development and optimization of neuromod...

With the increasing availability of new image registration approaches, an unbiased evaluation is becoming more needed so that clinicians can choose the most suitable approaches for their applications. Current evaluations typically use landmarks in manually annotated datasets. As a result, the quality of annotations is crucial for unbiased compariso...

Brain atlases that encompass detailed anatomical or physiological features are instrumental in the research and surgical planning of various neurological conditions. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has played important roles in neuro-image analysis while histological data remain crucial as a gold standard to guide and validate such analyses. With...

Recent evidence suggests an association between low back pain (LBP) and changes in lumbar paraspinal muscle morphology and composition (i.e., fatty infiltration). Quantitative measurements of muscle cross-sectional areas (CSAs) from MRI scans are commonly used to examine the relationship between paraspinal muscle characters and different lumbar con...

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Large-Scale Annotation of Biomedical Data and Expert Label Synthesis, LABELS 2019, the First International Workshop on Hardware Aware Learning for Medical Imaging and Computer Assisted Intervention, HAL-MICCAI 2019, and the Second International Workshop on Cor...

Neurovascular surgery aims to repair diseased or damaged blood vessels in the brain or spine. There are numerous procedures that fall under this category, and in all of them the direction of blood flow through these vessels is crucial information. Current methods to determine this information intraoperatively include: static pre-operative images co...

In brain tumor surgery, the quality and safety of the procedure can be impacted by intra-operative tissue deformation, called brain shift. Brain shift can move the surgical targets and other vital structures such as blood vessels, thus invalidating the presurgical plan. Intra-operative ultrasound (iUS) is a convenient and cost-effective imaging too...

Background: The zona incerta (ZI) is a small structure in the deep brain first identified by Auguste Forel for which robust in vivo visualization has remained elusive. The increased inherent signal from ultra-high field (7-Tesla or greater; 7T) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) presents an opportunity to see structures not previously visible. In thi...

Purpose: This pilot study aimed to evaluate the amino acid tracer F-FACBC with simultaneous PET/MRI in diagnostic assessment and neurosurgery of gliomas. Materials and methods: Eleven patients with suspected primary or recurrent low- or high-grade glioma received an F-FACBC PET/MRI examination before surgery. PET and MRI were used for diagnostic...

In brain tumor surgery, the quality and safety of the procedure can be impacted by intra-operative tissue deformation, called brain shift. Brain shift can move the surgical targets and other vital structures such as blood vessels, thus invalidating the pre-surgical plan. Intra-operative ultrasound (iUS) is a convenient and cost-effective imaging to...

Brain atlases that encompass detailed anatomical or physiological features are instrumental in the research and surgical planning of various neurological conditions. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has played important roles in neuro-image analysis while histological data remain crucial as a gold standard to guide and validate such analyses. With...

Purpose Image fusion of different imaging modalities renders valuable information to clinicians. In this paper, we proposed an automatic multimodal registration method to register intra-operative ultrasound images (US) to preoperative magnetic resonance images (MRI) in the context of image-guided neurosurgery. Methods We employed refined correlati...

Ultrasound (US) is a popular medical imaging technique in the clinic due to its low cost, high portability, and real-time diagnostic value. A special type of ultrasound technique, transcranial Doppler (TCD) ultrasound can be used to measure blood flows in cerebral blood vessels through acoustic bone windows of the intact human skull. Although TCD u...

Cerebral hyperperfusion syndrome (CHS) is a complication that can occur after carotid endarterectomy (CEA), the treatment of choice to decrease the subsequent risk of fatal or disabling stroke for patients with symptomatic severe stenosis of the carotid artery. Because of its rarity and complexity, the mechanism of the condition is still unclear, m...

Purpose: Growing evidence suggests an association between lumbar paraspinal muscle degeneration and low back pain (LBP). Currently, time-consuming and laborious manual segmentations of paraspinal muscles are commonly performed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) axial scans. Automated image analysis algorithms can mitigate these drawbacks, but the...

Tissue deformation during brain tumor removal often renders the original surgical plan invalid. This can greatly affect the quality of resection, and thus threaten the patient’s survival rate. Therefore, correction of such deformation is needed, which can be achieved through image registration between pre- and intra-operative images. We proposed a...

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of the International Workshop on Point-of-Care Ultrasound, POCUS 2018, the International Workshop on Bio-Imaging and Visualization for Patient-Customized Simulations, BIVPCS 2017, the International Workshop on Correction of Brainshift with Intra-Operative Ultrasound, CuRIOUS 2018, and the Interna...

Cerebrovascular surgery treats vessel abnormalities in the brain and spinal cord, including arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) and aneurysms. These procedures often involve clipping the vessels feeding blood to these abnormalities, making accurate classification of blood vessel types (feeding versus draining) important during surgery. Previous work...

Raw ultrasound (US) signal has a very high dynamic range (HDR) and, as such, is compressed in B-mode US using a logarithmic function to fit within the dynamic range of digital displays. However, in some cases, hyper-echogenic tissue can be overexposed at high gain levels with the loss of hypo-echogenic detail at low gain levels. This can cause the...

The author would like to include grant number of NSERC Discovery grant in the acknowledgement section of the original article.

Purpose: In brain tumor surgeries, maximum removal of cancerous tissue without compromising normal brain functions can improve the patient's survival rate and therapeutic benefits. To achieve this, diffusion MRI and intra-operative ultrasound (iUS) can be highly instrumental. While diffusion MRI allows the visualization of white matter tracts and...

Image guidance has become the standard of care for patient positioning in radiotherapy, where image registration is often a critical step to help manage patient motion. However, in practice, verification of registration quality is often adversely affected by difficulty in manual inspection of 3D images and time constraint, thus affecting the therap...

Stroke is the second leading cause of disability worldwide. Thrombectomy has been shown to offer fast and efficient reperfusion with high recanalization rates and thus improved patient outcomes. One of the most important indicators to identify patients amenable to thrombectomy is evidence of good collateral circulation. Currently, methods for evalu...

Background: Structural MRI and histopathological tissue sampling are routinely performed as part of the diagnostic work-up of glioma patients. Due to the heterogeneous nature of gliomas, there is however a risk of undergrading caused by histopathological sampling errors. MRI has limitations in identifying tumor grade and type, detecting diffuse in...

Most strain imaging techniques follow a pipeline strategy: in the first step tissue displacement is estimated from radio-frequency (RF) frames, and in the second step, a spatial derivative operation is applied. There are two main issues that arise from this framework. First, the gradient operation amplifies noise, and therefore, smoothing technique...

Transcranial Doppler (TCD) sonography is a special ultrasound (US) technique that can image and measure the blood flow within certain cerebral blood vessels through bone windows of the human skull. As a relatively inexpensive and portable medical imaging modality, it has shown great applications in the diagnosis and monitoring of a range of neurova...

Susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) venography can produce detailed venous contrast and complement arterial dominated MR angiography (MRA) techniques. However, these dense reversed-contrast SWI venograms pose new segmentation challenges. We present an automatic method for whole-brain venous blood segmentation in SWI using Conditional Random Field...

Purpose: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that impairs the motor functions. Both surgical treatment and study of PD require delineation of basal ganglia nuclei morphology. While many automatic volumetric segmentation methods have been proposed for the lentiform nucleus, few have attempted to identify the key brainstem subst...

Purpose: Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second leading neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's disease. In PD research and its surgical treatment, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS), anatomical structural identification and references for spatial normalization are essential, and human brain atlases/templates are proven highly instrumental....

Careful planning of deep brain stimulation (DBS) insertion trajectories is key to minimizing risks of surgery-related complications such as hemorrhages, cerebrospinal fluid leakage and loss of function. Recently, some computer-assisted frameworks were proposed and retrospectively validated to demonstrate superior optimization of many surgical const...