The Rotterdam Scan Study: Design update 2016 and main findings

Imaging plays an essential role in research on neurological diseases in the elderly. The Rotterdam Scan Study was initiated as part of the ongoing Rotterdam Study with the aim to elucidate the causes of neurological disease by performing imaging of the brain in a prospective population-based setting. Initially, in 1995 and 1999, random...

Older age relates to worsening of fine motor skills: A population-based study of middle-aged and elderly persons

Introduction: In a population-based study of 1,912 community-dwelling persons of 45 years and older, we investigated the relation between age and fine motor skills using the Archimedes spiral-drawing test. Also, we studied the effect of brain volume on fine motor skills. Methods: Participants were required to trace a template of a spiral on an...

Development and Validation of Intracranial Thrombus Segmentation on CT Angiography in Patients with Acute Ischemic Stroke

Background and Purpose: Thrombus characterization is increasingly considered important in predicting treatment success for patients with acute ischemic stroke. The lack of intensity contrast between thrombus and surrounding tissue in CT images makes manual delineation a difficult and time consuming task. Our aim was to develop an automated...

Atherosclerotic Plaque Component Segmentation in Combined Carotid MRI and CTA Data Incorporating Class Label Uncertainty

Atherosclerotic plaque composition can indicate plaque vulnerability. We segment atherosclerotic plaque components from the carotid artery on a combination of in vivo MRI and CT-angiography (CTA) data using supervised voxelwise classification. In contrast to previous studies the ground truth for training is directly obtained from 3D registration...

Global and focal brain volume in long-term breast cancer survivors exposed to adjuvant chemotherapy

A limited number of studies have associated adjuvant chemotherapy with structural brain changes. These studies had small sample sizes and were conducted shortly after cessation of chemotherapy. Results of these studies indicate local gray matter volume decrease and an increase in white matter lesions. Up till now, it is unclear if non-CNS...

The Rotterdam Scan Study: Design and update up to 2012

Neuroimaging plays an important role in etiologic research on neurological diseases in the elderly. The Rotterdam Scan Study was initiated as part of the ongoing Rotterdam Study with the aim to unravel causes of neurological disease by performing neuroimaging in a population-based longitudinal setting. In 1995 and 1999 random subsets of the...

Estimating 3D lumen centerlines of carotid arteries in free-hand acquisition ultrasound

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology to estimate the carotid artery lumen centerlines in ultrasound (US) images obtained in a free-hand examination. Challenging aspects here are speckle noise in US images, artifacts, and the lack of contrast in the direction orthogonal to the US beam direction. Method An algorithm based...

Incidence, treatment, and case-fatality of non-traumatic subarachnoid haemorrhage in the Netherlands

Background Non-traumatic subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) is a devastating disorder and in the majority of cases it is caused by rupture of an intracranial aneurysm. No actual data are available on the incidence of non-traumatic SAH and aneursymal SAH (aSAH) in the Netherlands and little is known about treatment patterns of aSAH. Our purpose was...

Region based level set segmentation of the outer wall of the carotid bifurcation in CTA

This paper presents a level set based method for segmenting the outer vessel wall and plaque components of the carotid artery in CTA. The method employs a GentleBoost classification framework that classifies pixels as calcified region or not, and inside or outside the vessel wall. The combined result of both classifications is used to construct...

Multispectral MRI centerline tracking in carotid arteries

We propose a minimum cost path approach to track the centerlines of the internal and external carotid arteries in multispectral MR data. User interaction is limited to the annotation of three seed points. The cost image is based on both a measure of vessel medialness and lumen intensity similarity in two MRA image sequences: Black Blood MRA and...

Statistical analysis of minimum cost path based structural brain connectivity

Diffusion MRI can be used to study the structural connectivity within the brain. Brain connectivity is often represented by a binary network whose topology can be studied using graph theory. We present a framework for the construction of weighted structural brain networks, containing information about connectivity, which can be effectively...

Intracranial aneurysm segmentation in 3D CT angiography: Method and quantitative validation