Cortical oscillations are thought to be involved in many cognitive functions and processes. Several mechanisms have been proposed to regulate oscillations. One prominent but understudied mechanism is gap junction coupling. Gap junctions are ubiquitous in cortex between GABAergic interneurons. Moreover, recent experiments indicate their strength can be modified in an activity-dependent manner, similar to chemical synapses. We hypothesized that activity-dependent gap junction plasticity acts as a mechanism to regulate oscillations in the cortex. We developed a computational model of gap junction plasticity in a recurrent cortical network based on recent experimental findings. We showed that gap junction plasticity can serve as a homeostatic mechanism for oscillations by maintaining a tight balance between two network states: asynchronous irregular activity and synchronized oscillations. This homeostatic mechanism allows for robust communication between neuronal assemblies through two different mechanisms: transient oscillations and frequency modulation. This implies a direct functional role for gap junction plasticity in information transmission in cortex.

Image-guidance improves tissue sampling during biopsy by allowing the physician to visualize the tip and trajectory of the biopsy needle relative to the target in MRI, CT, ultrasound, or other relevant imagery. This paper reports a system for fast automatic needle tip and trajectory localization and visualization in MRI that has been developed and tested in the context of an active clinical research program in prostate biopsy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported system for this clinical application, and also the first reported system that leverages deep neural networks for segmentation and localization of needles in MRI across biomedical applications. Needle tip and trajectory were annotated on 583 T2-weighted intra-procedural MRI scans acquired after needle insertion for 71 patients who underwent transperenial MRI-targeted biopsy procedure at our institution. The images were divided into two independent training-validation and test sets at the patient level. A deep 3-dimensional fully convolutional neural network model was developed, trained and deployed on these samples. The accuracy of the proposed method, as tested on previously unseen data, was 2.80 mm average in needle tip detection, and 0.98ᵒ in needle trajectory angle. An observer study was designed in which independent annotations by a second observer, blinded to the original observer, were compared to the output of the proposed method. The resultant error was comparable to the measured inter-observer concordance, reinforcing the clinical acceptability of the proposed method. The proposed system has the potential for deployment in clinical routine.

External-beam radiotherapy followed by high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy is the standard-of-care for treating gynecologic cancers. The enhanced soft-tissue contrast provided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) makes it a valuable imaging modality for diagnosing and treating these cancers. However, in contrast to computed tomography (CT) imaging, the appearance of the brachytherapy catheters, through which radiation sources are inserted to reach the cancerous tissue later on, is often variable across images. This paper reports, for the first time, a new deep-learning-based method for fully automatic segmentation of multiple closely spaced brachytherapy catheters in intraoperative MRI. Represented in the data are 50 gynecologic cancer patients treated by MRI-guided HDR brachytherapy. For each patient, a single intraoperative MRI was used. 826 catheters in the images were manually segmented by an expert radiation physicist who is also a trained radiation oncologist. The number of catheters in a patient ranged between 10 and 35. A deep 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) model was developed and trained. In order to make the learning process more robust, the network was trained 5 times, each time using a different combination of shown patients. Finally, each test case was processed by the five networks and the final segmentation was generated by voting on the obtained five candidate segmentations. 4-fold validation was executed and all the patients were segmented. An average distance error of 2.0  ±  3.4 mm was achieved. False positive and false negative catheters were 6.7% and 1.5% respectively. Average Dice score was equal to 0.60  ±  0.17. The algorithm is available for use in the open source software platform 3D Slicer allowing for wide scale testing and research discussion. In conclusion, to the best of our knowledge, fully automatic segmentation of multiple closely spaced catheters from intraoperative MR images was achieved for the first time in gynecological brachytherapy.

Segmentation of interstitial catheters from MRI needs to be addressed in order for MRI-based brachytherapy treatment planning to become part of the clinical practice of gynecologic cancer radiotherapy. This paper presents a validation study of a novel image-processing method for catheter segmentation. The method extends the distal catheter tip, interactively provided by the physician, to its proximal end, using knowledge of catheter geometry and appearance in MRI sequences. The validation study consisted of comparison of the algorithm results to expert manual segmentations, first on images of a phantom, and then on patient MRI images obtained during MRI-guided insertion of brachytherapy catheters for the treatment of gynecologic cancer. In the phantom experiment, the maximum disagreement between automatic and manual segmentation of the same MRI image, as computed using the Hausdorf distance, was 1.5 mm, which is of the same order as the MR image spatial resolution, while the disagreement between automatic segmentation of MR images and "ground truth", manual segmentation of CT images, was 3.5 mm. The segmentation method was applied to an IRB-approved retrospective database of 10 interstitial brachytherapy patients which included a total of 101 catheters. Compared with manual expert segmentations, the automatic method correctly segmented 93 out of 101 catheters, at an average rate of 0.3 seconds per catheter using a 3GHz Intel Core i7 computer with 16 GB RAM and running Mac OS X 10.7. These results suggest that the proposed catheter segmentation is both technically and clinically feasible.