Lesion Filling

Improve volume measurements by reducing intensity contrast within known lesion areas. It is intended for use with "small" lesions, such as those typical in Multiple Sclerosis.

Overview

This tool takes a user-defined lesion mask (usually created manually) together with a structural image (e.g. T1-weighted image, but it could also be T2-weighted, PD, etc.) and a white matter mask in order to "fill" the lesion area in the structural image with intensities that are similar to those in the non-lesion neighbourhood (restricted to white matter only). It has been shown (see references) that using such a method as part of a pre-processing pipeline can improve the registration and segmentation of pathological brains (particular those with Multiple Sclerosis) and the resultant volumetric measures of brain tissue.

A white matter mask is necessary so that lesions that touch areas of non-brain tissue, such as the ventricles, only fill the lesions with intensities from immediately surrounding white matter.

Referencing

If you use lesion_filling in your research, please make sure that you reference the article below.

  • M. Battaglini, M. Jenkinson, and N. De Stefano. Evaluating and reducing the impact of white matter lesions on brain volume measurements. Human Brain Mapping, 33(9):2062–2071, 2012.

Usage and options

The usage of the script is particularly simple and there are no configurable options.

Part of FSL (build 509)
lesion_filling 
Copyright(c) 2012, University of Oxford (Mark Jenkinson)

Usage: 
lesion_filling [options] -i <intensity image> -l <lesion mask image> -o <output/filled image>

Compulsory arguments (You MUST set one or more of):
        -i,--in input image filename (e.g. T1w image)
        -o,--out        output filename (lesion filled image)
        -l,--lesionmask filename of lesion mask image
        -w,--wmmask     filename of white matter mask image

Optional arguments (You may optionally specify one or more of):
        -v,--verbose    switch on diagnostic messages
        -h,--help       display this message
 

lesion_filling (last edited 20:56:30 02-06-2016 by MarkJenkinson)