Speaker
Dr
Piergiorgio Cerello
(INFN - TORINO)
Description
The MAGIC-5 Project, funded by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and the Ministry of Research, started in 2004 as an application of high energy physics expertise and techniques to the development of GRID based interfaces and algorithms for the analysis of medical images. It presently involves six INFN units, several physics departments in Italian Universities and a collaboration with some foreign institutions (CIVESTAV, Mexico and CEADEN, Cuba) as well as some medical doctors that contribute to the definition of the goals and requirements and the validation of the products.
MAGIC-5 was conceived with the goal of applying GRID Services to medical physics applications: many of them can be designed so as to be in many respects similar to simulations and data analysis use cases in high energy physics. After designing a GRID interface prototype, the project focus moved more and more towards the development of algorithms for the automated analysis of images.
Several problems were addressed by different teams in the project: the analysis of mammograms, in order to search for micro-calcification clusters and massive lesions, of lung Computed Tomographies (CT), to search for nodules as a signature for the patient follow-up, and of brain Magnetic Resonances (MR), with the goal of finding early markers of the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The common issue for these different applications is in the tools and expertise required for the development and in the goal of helping radiologists or neuroscientists to diagnose as early as possible, to improve the diagnosis sensibility and reduce the false positives rate.
The most recent results on lung CT and brain MRI analysis will be presented.
The collaboration with Hospitals is fruitful and it recently led to a new development, triggered by a request from a team of hematologists, that are carrying out a trial to validate a new approach to the treatment of lymphomas.
In order to meet the requirements of the trial and to guarantee that the approved protocol is appropriately followed, our team developed a WEB services based interface (called diXit), that makes possible the exchange of PET/CT images in real time. Therefore, it is possible to collect the diagnosis by several radiologists scattered around the world, as foreseen by the protocol, within the time limit (3 days) required to adapt the continuation of the therapy to the result.
Presently, the MAGIC-5 effort is shifting towards two extremely important goals: the algorithm validation on more and more extended data sets and the setting up of international teams/projects, so as to exploit at best the developments that have been carried on all over Europe: for example, it has been demonstrated that the combination of algorithms for the analysis of lung CTs can dramatically improve the global performance, reaching a sensitivity of about 90% at only about 10 false findings per scan.
Author
Dr
Piergiorgio Cerello
(INFN - TORINO)