Decrypting Cryptogenic Epilepsy: Machine Learning Methods for Detecting Cortical Malformations
Ahmed, Bilal.
2016
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Abstract: Epilepsy is
a common neurological disorder, affecting approximately 1% of the world's population.
Uncontrolled epilepsy can have harmful effects on the brain and increases the risk of
injuries and sudden death. Cortical malformations, particularly focal cortical dysplasia
(FCD) is recognized as one of the most common source of treatment resistant epilepsy
(TRE). Surgical resection ... read moreof the abnormal tissue is the only treatment for TRE patients,
and a successful outcome results in complete seizure freedom. Chances of success when
the lesion is visually detected on the MRI (MRI-positive) are 66%, and only 29% for
cases with undetected lesions (MRI-negative). Approximately 45%-60% of histologically
confirmed FCD lesions are missed by expert neuroradiologists. This dissertation develops
automated methods of detecting cortical malformations in MRI-negative patients using
surface-based morphometry. Using data from MRI-negative patients to train machine
learning (ML) algorithms has a number of confounding factors that limit their
applicability to the lesion detection task. These include, label noise arising from
subjectivity in determining the cortical region to resect without a visible abnormality.
Similarly, inter-subject and intra-subject variations in brain morphology limit the
generalization of ML methods trained on data aggregated from different individuals. To
address these issues we develop two novel ML methods. We propose a multitask learning
(MTL) method that models each patient as a separate learning task, and uses the results
of intra-cranial EEG exam as added supervision to mitigate label noise. Next, we develop
hierarchical conditional random fields (HCRF) for outlier-detection, which is a
semi-supervised learning method that does not require labeled training data. By
correcting for all three factors (i.e., label noise, intra-subject and inter-subject
variation) HCRF outperforms the baseline methods and the MTL method. The high detection
rate (75% for HCRF) of the proposed methods for MRI-negative patients shows that some
electrophysiologically and histologically abnormal cortical regions are not visually
apparent to the human eye but can be detected using ML methods. Incorporating such ML
methods in the pre-surgical evaluation protocol have the potential to enhance the
chances of detecting the lesion prior to surgery, leading to an increased number of
patients being referred to resective surgery.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2016.
Submitted to the Dept. of Computer Science.
Advisor: Carla Brodley.
Committee: Roni Khardon, Benjamin Hescott, Shuchin Aeron, and Thomas Thesen.
Keywords: Computer science, Artificial intelligence, and Medical imaging.read less - ID:
- 7p88ct51w
- Component ID:
- tufts:21169
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
