Efficient Atrophy Mapping A Single-Step U-Net Approach for Rapid Brain Change Estimation

Abstract

The estimation of brain atrophy is crucial for eval-uating brain diseases and analyzing neurodegeneration. Existing methods for computing atrophy maps often suffer from lengthy processing times due to the computational cost of multi-step processing. In this work, we propose a novel technique for atrophy map calculation using a single U-net-based architecture. This approach consolidates multiple traditional medical imaging processing steps into a single process, aiming to accelerate the computational time required. Specifically, our method estimates structural changes by generating a flow map from two longitudinal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of the same subject. We trained and evaluated our system on a dataset comprising 2000 Tl-weighted MRI scans sourced from two different public datasets on Alzheimer’s Disease. Experimental results demonstrate a considerable reduction in execution time …