TY - JOUR A1 - Mayer, Julius A1 - Baum, Daniel A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph A1 - for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, T1 - Shape-based Disease Grading via Functional Maps and Graph Convolutional Networks with Application to Alzheimer’s Disease JF - BMC Medical Imaging N2 - Shape analysis provides methods for understanding anatomical structures extracted from medical images. However, the underlying notions of shape spaces that are frequently employed come with strict assumptions prohibiting the analysis of incomplete and/or topologically varying shapes. This work aims to alleviate these limitations by adapting the concept of functional maps. Further, we present a graph-based learning approach for morphometric classification of disease states that uses novel shape descriptors based on this concept. We demonstrate the performance of the derived classifier on the open-access ADNI database differentiating normal controls and subjects with Alzheimer’s disease. Notably, the experiments show that our approach can improve over state-of-the-art from geometric deep learning. Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12880-024-01513-z VL - 24 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Zachow, Stefan A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph T1 - Geodesic B-Score for Improved Assessment of Knee Osteoarthritis T2 - Proc. Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI) N2 - Three-dimensional medical imaging enables detailed understanding of osteoarthritis structural status. However, there remains a vast need for automatic, thus, reader-independent measures that provide reliable assessment of subject-specific clinical outcomes. To this end, we derive a consistent generalization of the recently proposed B-score to Riemannian shape spaces. We further present an algorithmic treatment yielding simple, yet efficient computations allowing for analysis of large shape populations with several thousand samples. Our intrinsic formulation exhibits improved discrimination ability over its Euclidean counterpart, which we demonstrate for predictive validity on assessing risks of total knee replacement. This result highlights the potential of the geodesic B-score to enable improved personalized assessment and stratification for interventions. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78191-0_14 SP - 177 EP - 188 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hembus, Jessica A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Zachow, Stefan A1 - Bader, Rainer T1 - Establishment of a rolling-sliding test bench to analyze abrasive wear propagation of different bearing materials for knee implants JF - Applied Sciences N2 - Currently, new materials for knee implants need to be extensively and expensive tested in a knee wear simulator in a realized design. However, using a rolling-sliding test bench, these materials can be examined under the same test conditions but with simplified geometries. In the present study, the test bench was optimized, and forces were adapted to the physiological contact pressure in the knee joint using the available geometric parameters. Various polymers made of polyethylene and polyurethane articulating against test wheels made of cobalt-chromium and aluminum titanate were tested in the test bench using adapted forces based on ISO 14243-1. Polyurethane materials showed distinctly higher wear rates than polyethylene materials and showed inadequate wear resistance for use as knee implant material. Thus, the rolling-sliding test bench is an adaptable test setup for evaluating newly developed bearing materials for knee implants. It combines the advantages of screening and simulator tests and allows testing of various bearing materials under physiological load and tribological conditions of the human knee joint. The wear behavior of different material compositions and the influence of surface geometry and quality can be initially investigated without the need to produce complex implant prototypes of total knee endoprosthesis or interpositional spacers. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3390/app11041886 VL - 11 IS - 4 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Tack, Alexander A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Zachow, Stefan T1 - Towards novel osteoarthritis biomarkers: Multi-criteria evaluation of 46,996 segmented knee MRI data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (Supplementary Material) T2 - PLOS One N2 - Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the state-of-the-art for automated assessment of knee osteoarthritis (KOA) from medical image data. However, these methods lack interpretability, mainly focus on image texture, and cannot completely grasp the analyzed anatomies’ shapes. In this study we assess the informative value of quantitative features derived from segmentations in order to assess their potential as an alternative or extension to CNN-based approaches regarding multiple aspects of KOA A fully automated method is employed to segment six anatomical structures around the knee (femoral and tibial bones, femoral and tibial cartilages, and both menisci) in 46,996 MRI scans. Based on these segmentations, quantitative features are computed, i.e., measurements such as cartilage volume, meniscal extrusion and tibial coverage, as well as geometric features based on a statistical shape encoding of the anatomies. The feature quality is assessed by investigating their association to the Kellgren-Lawrence grade (KLG), joint space narrowing (JSN), incident KOA, and total knee replacement (TKR). Using gold standard labels from the Osteoarthritis Initiative database the balanced accuracy (BA), the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUC), and weighted kappa statistics are evaluated. Features based on shape encodings of femur, tibia, and menisci plus the performed measurements showed most potential as KOA biomarkers. Differentiation between healthy and severely arthritic knees yielded BAs of up to 99%, 84% were achieved for diagnosis of early KOA. Substantial agreement with weighted kappa values of 0.73, 0.73, and 0.79 were achieved for classification of the grade of medial JSN, lateral JSN, and KLG, respectively. The AUC was 0.60 and 0.75 for prediction of incident KOA and TKR within 5 years, respectively. Quantitative features from automated segmentations yield excellent results for KLG and JSN classification and show potential for incident KOA and TKR prediction. The validity of these features as KOA biomarkers should be further evaluated, especially as extensions of CNN-based approaches. To foster such developments we make all segmentations publicly available together with this publication. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.12752/8328 N1 - 46,996 automated segmentations for data from the OAI database. VL - 16 IS - 10 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sekuboyina, Anjany A1 - Husseini, Malek E. A1 - Bayat, Amirhossein A1 - Löffler, Maximilian A1 - Liebl, Hans A1 - Li, Hongwei A1 - Tetteh, Giles A1 - Kukačka, Jan A1 - Payer, Christian A1 - Štern, Darko A1 - Urschler, Martin A1 - Chen, Maodong A1 - Cheng, Dalong A1 - Lessmann, Nikolas A1 - Hu, Yujin A1 - Wang, Tianfu A1 - Yang, Dong A1 - Xu, Daguang A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Amiranashvili, Tamaz A1 - Ehlke, Moritz A1 - Lamecker, Hans A1 - Lehnert, Sebastian A1 - Lirio, Marilia A1 - de Olaguer, Nicolás Pérez A1 - Ramm, Heiko A1 - Sahu, Manish A1 - Tack, Alexander A1 - Zachow, Stefan A1 - Jiang, Tao A1 - Ma, Xinjun A1 - Angerman, Christoph A1 - Wang, Xin A1 - Brown, Kevin A1 - Kirszenberg, Alexandre A1 - Puybareau, Élodie A1 - Chen, Di A1 - Bai, Yiwei A1 - Rapazzo, Brandon H. A1 - Yeah, Timyoas A1 - Zhang, Amber A1 - Xu, Shangliang A1 - Hou, Feng A1 - He, Zhiqiang A1 - Zeng, Chan A1 - Xiangshang, Zheng A1 - Liming, Xu A1 - Netherton, Tucker J. A1 - Mumme, Raymond P. A1 - Court, Laurence E. A1 - Huang, Zixun A1 - He, Chenhang A1 - Wang, Li-Wen A1 - Ling, Sai Ho A1 - Huynh, Lê Duy A1 - Boutry, Nicolas A1 - Jakubicek, Roman A1 - Chmelik, Jiri A1 - Mulay, Supriti A1 - Sivaprakasam, Mohanasankar A1 - Paetzold, Johannes C. A1 - Shit, Suprosanna A1 - Ezhov, Ivan A1 - Wiestler, Benedikt A1 - Glocker, Ben A1 - Valentinitsch, Alexander A1 - Rempfler, Markus A1 - Menze, Björn H. A1 - Kirschke, Jan S. T1 - VerSe: A Vertebrae labelling and segmentation benchmark for multi-detector CT images JF - Medical Image Analysis N2 - Vertebral labelling and segmentation are two fundamental tasks in an automated spine processing pipeline. Reliable and accurate processing of spine images is expected to benefit clinical decision support systems for diagnosis, surgery planning, and population-based analysis of spine and bone health. However, designing automated algorithms for spine processing is challenging predominantly due to considerable variations in anatomy and acquisition protocols and due to a severe shortage of publicly available data. Addressing these limitations, the Large Scale Vertebrae Segmentation Challenge (VerSe) was organised in conjunction with the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2019 and 2020, with a call for algorithms tackling the labelling and segmentation of vertebrae. Two datasets containing a total of 374 multi-detector CT scans from 355 patients were prepared and 4505 vertebrae have individually been annotated at voxel level by a human-machine hybrid algorithm (https://osf.io/nqjyw/, https://osf.io/t98fz/). A total of 25 algorithms were benchmarked on these datasets. In this work, we present the results of this evaluation and further investigate the performance variation at the vertebra level, scan level, and different fields of view. We also evaluate the generalisability of the approaches to an implicit domain shift in data by evaluating the top-performing algorithms of one challenge iteration on data from the other iteration. The principal takeaway from VerSe: the performance of an algorithm in labelling and segmenting a spine scan hinges on its ability to correctly identify vertebrae in cases of rare anatomical variations. The VerSe content and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/anjany/verse. Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2021.102166 VL - 73 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Navayazdani, Esfandiar A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Hanik, Martin A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph T1 - Sasaki Metric for Spline Models of Manifold-Valued Trajectories JF - Computer Aided Geometric Design N2 - We propose a generic spatiotemporal framework to analyze manifold-valued measurements, which allows for employing an intrinsic and computationally efficient Riemannian hierarchical model. Particularly, utilizing regression, we represent discrete trajectories in a Riemannian manifold by composite Bézier splines, propose a natural metric induced by the Sasaki metric to compare the trajectories, and estimate average trajectories as group-wise trends. We evaluate our framework in comparison to state-of-the-art methods within qualitative and quantitative experiments on hurricane tracks. Notably, our results demonstrate the superiority of spline-based approaches for an intensity classification of the tracks. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cagd.2023.102220 VL - 104 SP - 102220 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Zachow, Stefan A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph T1 - Geodesic B-Score for Improved Assessment of Knee Osteoarthritis N2 - Three-dimensional medical imaging enables detailed understanding of osteoarthritis structural status. However, there remains a vast need for automatic, thus, reader-independent measures that provide reliable assessment of subject-specific clinical outcomes. To this end, we derive a consistent generalization of the recently proposed B-score to Riemannian shape spaces. We further present an algorithmic treatment yielding simple, yet efficient computations allowing for analysis of large shape populations with several thousand samples. Our intrinsic formulation exhibits improved discrimination ability over its Euclidean counterpart, which we demonstrate for predictive validity on assessing risks of total knee replacement. This result highlights the potential of the geodesic B-score to enable improved personalized assessment and stratification for interventions. T3 - ZIB-Report - 21-09 KW - Statistical shape analysis KW - Osteoarthritis KW - Geometric statistics KW - Riemannian manifolds Y1 - 2021 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-81930 SN - 1438-0064 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Glatzeder, Korbinian A1 - Komnik, Igor A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Zachow, Stefan A1 - Potthast, Wolfgang T1 - Dynamic pressure analysis of novel interpositional knee spacer implants in 3D-printed human knee models JF - Scientific Reports N2 - Alternative treatment methods for knee osteoarthritis (OA) are in demand, to delay the young (< 50 Years) patient’s need for osteotomy or knee replacement. Novel interpositional knee spacers shape based on statistical shape model (SSM) approach and made of polyurethane (PU) were developed to present a minimally invasive method to treat medial OA in the knee. The implant should be supposed to reduce peak strains and pain, restore the stability of the knee, correct the malalignment of a varus knee and improve joint function and gait. Firstly, the spacers were tested in artificial knee models. It is assumed that by application of a spacer, a significant reduction in stress values and a significant increase in the contact area in the medial compartment of the knee will be registered. Biomechanical analysis of the effect of novel interpositional knee spacer implants on pressure distribution in 3D-printed knee model replicas: the primary purpose was the medial joint contact stress-related biomechanics. A secondary purpose was a better understanding of medial/lateral redistribution of joint loading. Six 3D printed knee models were reproduced from cadaveric leg computed tomography. Each of four spacer implants was tested in each knee geometry under realistic arthrokinematic dynamic loading conditions, to examine the pressure distribution in the knee joint. All spacers showed reduced mean stress values by 84–88% and peak stress values by 524–704% in the medial knee joint compartment compared to the non-spacer test condition. The contact area was enlarged by 462–627% as a result of the inserted spacers. Concerning the appreciable contact stress reduction and enlargement of the contact area in the medial knee joint compartment, the premises are in place for testing the implants directly on human knee cadavers to gain further insights into a possible tool for treating medial knee osteoarthritis. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20463-6 VL - 12 ER - TY - THES A1 - Ambellan, Felix T1 - Efficient Riemannian Statistical Shape Analysis with Applications in Disease Assessment N2 - In this work, we address the challenge of developing statistical shape models that account for the non-Euclidean nature inherent to (anatomical) shape variation and at the same time offer fast, numerically robust processing and as much invariance as possible regarding translation and rotation, i.e. Euclidean motion. With the aim of doing that we formulate a continuous and physically motivated notion of shape space based on deformation gradients. We follow two different tracks endowing this differential representation with a Riemannian structure to establish a statistical shape model. (1) We derive a model based on differential coordinates as elements in GL(3)+. To this end, we adapt the notion of bi-invariant means employing an affine connection structure on GL(3)+. Furthermore, we perform second-order statistics based on a family of Riemannian metrics providing the most possible invariance, viz. GL(3)+-left-invariance and O(3)-right-invariance. (2) We endow the differential coordinates with a non-Euclidean structure, that stems from a product Lie group of stretches and rotations. This structure admits a bi-invariant metric and thus allows for a consistent analysis via manifold-valued Riemannian statistics. This work further presents a novel shape representation based on discrete fundamental forms that is naturally invariant under Euclidean motion, namely the fundamental coordinates. We endow this representation with a Lie group structure that admits bi-invariant metrics and therefore allows for consistent analysis using manifold-valued statistics based on the Riemannian framework. Furthermore, we derive a simple, efficient, robust, yet accurate (i.e. without resorting to model approximations) solver for the inverse problem that allows for interactive applications. Beyond statistical shape modeling the proposed framework is amenable for surface processing such as quasi-isometric flattening. Additionally, the last part of the thesis aims on shape-based, continuous disease stratification to provide means that objectify disease assessment over the current clinical practice of ordinal grading systems. Therefore, we derive the geodesic B-score, a generalization of the of the Euclidean B-score, in order to assess knee osteoarthritis. In this context we present a Newton-type fixed point iteration for projection onto geodesics in shape space. On the application side, we show that the derived geodesic B-score features, in comparison to its Euclidean counterpart, an improved predictive performance on assessing the risk of total knee replacement surgery. Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:188-refubium-37016-3 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Mayer, Julius A1 - Baum, Daniel A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph T1 - A Soft-Correspondence Approach to Shape-based Disease Grading with Graph Convolutional Networks T2 - Proceedings of Machine Learning Research N2 - Shape analysis provides principled means for understanding anatomical structures from medical images. The underlying notions of shape spaces, however, come with strict assumptions prohibiting the analysis of incomplete and/or topologically varying shapes. This work aims to alleviate these limitations by adapting the concept of soft correspondences. In particular, we present a graph-based learning approach for morphometric classification of disease states that is based on a generalized notion of shape correspondences in terms of functional maps. We demonstrate the performance of the derived classifier on the open-access ADNI database for differentiating normal controls and subjects with Alzheimer’s disease. Notably, our experiment shows that our approach can improve over state-of-the-art from geometric deep learning. Y1 - 2022 VL - 194 SP - 85 EP - 95 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kofler, Andreas A1 - Wald, Christian A1 - Kolbitsch, Christoph A1 - von Tycowicz, Christoph A1 - Ambellan, Felix T1 - Joint Reconstruction and Segmentation in Undersampled 3D Knee MRI combining Shape Knowledge and Deep Learning JF - Physics in Medicine and Biology N2 - Task-adapted image reconstruction methods using end-to-end trainable neural networks (NNs) have been proposed to optimize reconstruction for subsequent processing tasks, such as segmentation. However, their training typically requires considerable hardware resources and thus, only relatively simple building blocks, e.g. U-Nets, are typically used, which, albeit powerful, do not integrate model-specific knowledge. In this work, we extend an end-to-end trainable task-adapted image reconstruction method for a clinically realistic reconstruction and segmentation problem of bone and cartilage in 3D knee MRI by incorporating statistical shape models (SSMs). The SSMs model the prior information and help to regularize the segmentation maps as a final post-processing step. We compare the proposed method to a state-of-the-art (SOTA) simultaneous multitask learning approach for image reconstruction and segmentation (MTL) and to a complex SSMs-informed segmentation pipeline (SIS). Our experiments show that the combination of joint end-to-end training and SSMs to further regularize the segmentation maps obtained by MTL highly improves the results, especially in terms of mean and maximal surface errors. In particular, we achieve the segmentation quality of SIS and, at the same time, a substantial model reduction that yields a five-fold decimation in model parameters and a computational speedup of an order of magnitude. Remarkably, even for undersampling factors of up to R=8, the obtained segmentation maps are of comparable quality to those obtained by SIS from ground-truth images. Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/ad3797 VL - 69 IS - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Caputo, Ariel A1 - Emporio, Marco A1 - Giachetti, Andrea A1 - Cristani, Marco A1 - Borghi, Guido A1 - D'Eusanio, Andrea A1 - Le, Minh-Quan A1 - Nguyen, Hai-Dang A1 - Tran, Minh-Triet A1 - Ambellan, Felix A1 - Hanik, Martin A1 - Navayazdani, Esfandiar A1 - Tycowicz, Christoph von T1 - SHREC 2022 Track on Online Detection of Heterogeneous Gestures JF - Computers and Graphics N2 - This paper presents the outcomes of a contest organized to evaluate methods for the online recognition of heterogeneous gestures from sequences of 3D hand poses. The task is the detection of gestures belonging to a dictionary of 16 classes characterized by different pose and motion features. The dataset features continuous sequences of hand tracking data where the gestures are interleaved with non-significant motions. The data have been captured using the Hololens 2 finger tracking system in a realistic use-case of mixed reality interaction. The evaluation is based not only on the detection performances but also on the latency and the false positives, making it possible to understand the feasibility of practical interaction tools based on the algorithms proposed. The outcomes of the contest's evaluation demonstrate the necessity of further research to reduce recognition errors, while the computational cost of the algorithms proposed is sufficiently low. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2022.07.015 VL - 107 SP - 241 EP - 251 ER -