Kitware to Develop Novel Neuroimage Processing Methods for Traumatic Brain Injury

Kitware is very pleased to announce the award of $296,676 in NIH Phase I STTR funding for the development of new neuroimage processing methods for the assessment and improved treatment of traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Nearly 1.7 million Americans suffer TBI annually as a result of car accidents, blunt trauma, gunshots, military combat, and other head traumas. Many who experience TBI require surgical intervention, and in some cases, require daily assistance for years post-injury. Healthcare costs associated with current TBI treatment exceed $60 billion a year; however, existing analytic assessment methods fall short of clinical need. Clinicians require informative metrics and easy-to-use image analysis tools capable of handling large, heterogeneous pathologies that cause severe brain deformations.

To address these critical needs, Kitware will collaborate with Dr. Marc Niethammer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Dr. Jack Van Horn at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The team will leverage computational methods for segmenting, registering, and interpreting images that contain large and changing pathologies to better characterize injury, quantify longitudinal changes, predict outcomes, and support patient treatment management. At Kitware, Stephen Aylward, Senior Director of Operations, North Carolina, is the Principal Investigator; he will work closely with Project Leader Danielle Pace, a Research and Development Engineer at Kitware.

The team will perform multimodal brain image segmentation for the assessment of acute and chronic TBI for measuring damage over a period of time; develop a new deformable image registration method for identifying acute and chronic TBI and change measurement; and investigate novel TBI metrics for predicting outcomes and guiding clinical decision making using multivariate statistics. The resulting software will be delivered to clinicians and made freely available for widespread use and future extension within the open-source 3D Slicer application (http://www.slicer.org).

“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to address such a critical medical need,” said Danielle Pace, Project Leader. “Through our exploration of TBI and new analytical and statistical methods for better understanding its effects across groups of individuals over time, clinicians will be empowered to more easily examine patient-specific profiles of TBI and make more informed decisions in regards to treatment.”

For more information on Kitware’s medical computing expertise and how it can be leveraged to benefit your organization, please contact kitware@kitware.com.