基于各向异性扩散活动轮廓模型的左心室MRI分割

结合各向异性扩散算法与梯度矢量流活动轮廓模型,提出了基于各向异性扩散活动轮廓模型并应用于心脏核磁共振图像分割;模型采用各向异性扩散方程构造活动轮廓模型的外部能量函数,得到边界更加清晰的分段平滑图像,运用梯度矢量流将边缘图梯度散射到平坦区域,可以有效抑制噪声,同时保持了目标边界;对左心室核磁共振图像的分割实验表明,该模型可以克服噪声和伪影的干扰,与原梯度矢量流模型相比具有更高的精确性和可靠性,有利于实现自动分割.     

Segmentation of the left ventricle in cardiac cine MRI using a shape-constrained snake model

Segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) is a hot topic in cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images analysis. In this paper, we present an automatic LV myocardial boundary segmentation method using the parametric active contour model (or snake model). By convolving the gradient map of an image, a fast external force named gradient vector convolution (GVC) is presented for the snake model. A circle-based energy is incorporated into the GVC snake model to extract the endocardium. With this prior constraint, the snake contour can conquer the unexpected local minimum stemming from artifacts and papillary muscle, etc. After the endocardium is detected, the original edge map around and within the endocardium is directly set to zero. This modified edge map is used to generate a new GVC force filed, which automatically pushes the snake contour directly to the epicardium by employing the endocardium result as initialization. Meanwhile, a novel shape-similarity based energy is proposed to prevent the snake contour from being strapped in faulty edges and to preserve weak boundaries. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations on our dataset and the publicly available database (e.g. MICCAI 2009) demonstrate the good performance of our algorithm.     

带标记线左心室MR图像的自动分割

带标记线核磁共振(MR)图像能够提供了大量的运动信息，为实现左心室的运动重建提供了有利条件，但图像中存在灰度的不一致性、弱边界、伪影、标记线的影响等现象，这些都给带标记线左心室MR图像的分割带来了困难。目前带标记线核磁共振图像的左心室分割主要靠人工完成，为此提出了一种自动分割方法，它是基于分级处理的分割方法，主要由3部分组成：首先用数学形态学的方法实现左心室的自动定位；然后用K均值聚类、模板匹配和基于骨架的心肌形状恢复方法给出左心室的内外初始轮廓线；最后用改进的水平集方法对初始轮廓线进行演化而得到最终结果。实验结果证明，此方法有较强的鲁棒性，是行之有效的方法。     

一种基于广义梯度矢量流Snake模型的心脏MR图像分割方法

提出了一种基于广义梯度矢量流Snake模型的心脏核磁共振图像左心室内、外膜分割方法。首先构造了一种基于目标边缘的方向广义梯度矢量流(edge-based directional generalized gradient vector flow, EDGGVF) Snake模型,该模型在传统GGVF的基础上,结合目标边缘图梯度方向信息,将左心室内、外膜区分为正边缘和负边缘,从而实现左心室内外膜的全自动分割。其次,根据左心室近似为圆形的形状特点,引入了圆形能量约束,有利于克服由于图像灰度不均、乳突肌等引起的局部极小。实验结果表明,该方法可以高效准确地自动分割出左心室内、外膜。     

一种心脏核磁共振图像左室壁内、外膜分割方法

为了充分利用心脏核磁共振图像(magnetic resonance image,简称MRI)中关于左心室的解剖和功能信息,必须先分割左室壁内、外膜.提出一种基于Snake模型的左室壁内、外膜分割方法.首先提出了Snake模型的卷积虚拟静电场外力模型CONVEF(convolutional virtual electric field),该外力场捕捉范围大、抗噪能力强、在C形凹陷区域等问题上性能突出,而且基于卷积运算,采用快速Fourier变换可以实时计算.就左室壁内膜的分割而言,考虑到左室壁的形状近似为圆形,引入基于圆形约束的能量项.对于左室壁外膜的分割,充分挖掘了左室壁内、外膜形状上的相似性和位置上的相关性,构造了形状相似性内能和一个新的边缘图,该边缘图用来计算新的外力场.基于所有这些策略并采用内膜的分割结果初始化,可以自动、准确地分割外膜.通过对一套活体心脏MR(magnetic resonance)图像进行分割并和手工分割结果和GGVF(generalized gradient vector flow) Snake模型的分割结果进行比较,结果表明该方法是有效的.     

结合纹理与形状的Tagged MR图像左心室分割算法

分割带标记线核磁共振(tagged MR)图像是左心室运动重建的前提.由于标记线的加载破坏了左心室的轮廓边缘和区域灰度一致性,再加上乳突肌的存在,使带标记线核磁共振图像的左心室内外轮廓分割变得相当困难.在变分框架下,将纹理分类信息与形状统计先验知识引入Mumford-Shah模型中,提出了一种改进的分割带标记线核磁共振图像的左心室内外轮廓的方法.该方法基于支持向量机对S滤波器组提取的纹理特征的分类结果,构造了一种新的图像能量表示;针对乳突肌及边缘断裂现象,引入形状统计先验信息来约束曲线的演化.因为分割过程利用了有监督学习策略,较好地克服了标记线对左心室区域灰度的影响,提高了分割精度.实验结果表明,该方法较以往方法具有更高的分割精度和更好的稳定性.     

Semi-automated CT segmentation using optic flow and Fourier interpolation techniques

In radiotherapy treatment planning, tumor volumes and anatomical structures are manually contoured for dose calculation, which takes time for clinicians. This study examines the use of semi-automated segmentation of CT images. A few high curvature points are manually drawn on a CT slice. Then Fourier interpolation is used to complete the contour. Consequently, optical flow, a deformable image registration method, is used to map the original contour to other slices. This technique has been applied successfully to contour anatomical structures and tumors. The maximum difference between the mapped contours and manually drawn contours was 6 pixels, which is similar in magnitude to difference one would see in manually drawn contours by different clinicians. The technique fails when the region to contour is topologically different between two slices. A solution is recommended to manually delineate contours on a sparse subset of slices and then map in both directions to fill the remaining slices.     

Semi-automated CT segmentation using optic flow and Fourier interpolation techniques

In radiotherapy treatment planning, tumor volumes and anatomical structures are manually contoured for dose calculation, which takes time for clinicians. This study examines the use of semi-automated segmentation of CT images. A few high curvature points are manually drawn on a CT slice. Then Fourier interpolation is used to complete the contour. Consequently, optical flow, a deformable image registration method, is used to map the original contour to other slices. This technique has been applied successfully to contour anatomical structures and tumors. The maximum difference between the mapped contours and manually drawn contours was 6 pixels, which is similar in magnitude to difference one would see in manually drawn contours by different clinicians. The technique fails when the region to contour is topologically different between two slices. A solution is recommended to manually delineate contours on a sparse subset of slices and then map in both directions to fill the remaining slices.     

A study on the 3D position estimation of ventricular borders extracted from 2D echocardiography data

We study on the reconstruction of 3D left ventricle(LV) using only 2D echocardiography data and information on apical long-axis views. Especially, this paper focuses on determining the 3D position of LV contours extracted from 2D echocardiography images. First we mathematically model the relationship between LV contours on the apical views and their corresponding 3D positions. The relationship is expressed as a linear equation in which the right-hand side is the measured data consisting of all the LV contour points on each view and the coefficient matrix is an unknown matrix that transforms the unknown 3D positions into contour points on their related apical view, with distance and orthogonality conditions on the coefficient matrix and the 3D positions. Next we consider a non-convex constrained minimization problem to determine the coefficient matrix and the 3D positions. To solve this minimization problem, we adopt two block coordinate descent method with a solver in OPTI for quadratically constrained quadratic program. For validating the proposed method, some numerical experiments are performed with synthetic data. The experimental results show that the proposed model is promising and available for real echocardiographydata.     

An active contour model driven by anisotropic region fitting energy for image segmentation

A novel region active contour model (ACM) for image segmentation is proposed in this paper. In order to perform an accurate segmentation of images with non-homogeneous intensity, the original region fitting energy in the general region-based ACMs is improved by an anisotropic region fitting energy to evolve the contour. Using the local image information described by the structure tensor, this new region fitting energy is defined in terms of two anisotropic fitting functions that approximate the image intensity along the principal directions of variation of the intensity. Therefore, the anisotropic fitting functions extract intensity information more precisely, which enable our model to cope with the boundaries with low-contrast and complicated structures. It is incorporated into a variational formula with a total variation (TV) regularization term with respect to level set function, from which the segmentation process is performed by minimizing this variational energy functional. Experiments on the vessel and brain magnetic resonance images demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over Chan–Vese (CV) active contours and local binary active contours (LBF) in terms of both efficiency and accuracy.     

A novel active contour model for image segmentation using distance regularization term

In this paper, a novel active contour model (R-DRLSE model) based on level set method is proposed for image segmentation. The R-DRLSE model is a variational level set approach that utilizes the region information to find image contours by minimizing the presented energy functional. To avoid the time-consuming re-initialization step, the distance regularization term is used to penalize the deviation of the level set function from a signed distance function. The numerical implementation scheme of the model can significantly reduce the iteration number and computation time. The results of experiments performed on some synthetic and real images show that the R-DRLSE model is effective and efficient. In particular, our method has been applied to MR kidney image segmentation with desirable results.     

Vander Lugt Correlator based active contours for iris segmentation and tracking

Iris segmentation using active contours approaches is receiving increasing attention. In this paper, a self-ruling active contour approach based on the optical correlation algorithm is proposed. The novelty of this research effort is to apply the Optical Correlation based Active Contours (OCAC) on iris segmentation and tracking and highlight the advantages of its small computation time and better accuracy performance. Optical correlation computed with a numerical simulation of the Vander Lugt correlator is used to detect iris and pupil areas which used as an initial contours. As a result, these initial contours assists the method to calculate terms in an energy expression. In the proposed method, several references images called filters of iris and pupil have been introduced. Images from four iris datasets as CASIA v4, WVU non-ideal, MMU2, UBIRIS v2, and a motion video were used in the experiments phase. To present an aggregate overview of the proposed method advantages, we computed several parameters as iris and pupil centers localization errors, iris and pupil rays errors, three performance metrics (as Jaccard coefficient, Dice coefficient, Hausdroff distance), average segmentation error, and average execution time. We compare these segmentation performance parameters with several leading techniques demonstrating significantly improved results with the proposed OCAC technique.     

显著性驱动的局部相似拟合模型分割算法研究

灰度不均匀和噪声图像的分割是计算机视觉中的难点。现有的活动轮廓模型尽管能够取得较好的分割效果,但仍然对噪声图像分割效果不理想,初始轮廓曲线的选取敏感,优化易陷入局部极小导致演化速度慢等问题。针对该问题,首先使用局部区域灰度的均值和方差拟合高斯分布,构建新的能量泛函,均值和方差随着能量的最小化过程而变化,从而增强了灰度不均匀和噪声图像的分割能力。此外,结合视觉显著性检测算法获取待分割目标的先验形状信息,并自适应地创建水平集函数,从而降低了初始轮廓位置敏感性及计算时间复杂度,实现全自动的图像分割。实验结果证明,提出的算法可以用于灰度不均匀和噪声图像分割,并取得了较好的分割性能,消除了算法对初始轮廓位置敏感性,减少了迭代次数。     

A disk expansion segmentation method for ultrasonic breast lesions

Automatically extracting lesion boundaries in ultrasound images is difficult due to the variance in shape and interference from speckle noise. An effective scheme of removing speckle noise can facilitate the segmentation of ultrasonic breast lesions, which can be performed with an iterative disk expansion method. In this study, a disk expansion segmentation method is proposed to semi-automatically find lesion contours in ultrasonic breast image. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the simulations with seven types of cysts, three in vitro phantom images and 10 clinical breast images are introduced. The mean normalized true positive area overlap between simulated contours and contours obtained by the proposed method is over 85% in simulation results. A strong correlation exists between physicians’ manual delineations and detected contours in clinical breast images. In addition, the method is also verified to be able to simultaneously contour multiple lesions in a single image. In comparison with the conventional active contour model, our proposed method does not require any initial seed within a lesion and thus, it is more convenient and applicable.     

结合MRF能量和模糊速度的乳腺癌图像分割方法

乳腺癌灶的精确分割是乳腺癌计算机辅助诊断的重要前提. 在动态对比增强核磁共振成像(Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging, DCE-MRI)的图像中, 乳腺癌灶具有对比度低、边界模糊及亮度不均匀等特点, 传统的活动轮廓模型方法很难取得准确的分割结果. 本文提出一种结合马尔科夫随机场(Markov random field, MRF)能量和模糊速度函数的活动轮廓模型的半自动分割方法来完成乳腺癌灶的分割, 相对于专业医生的手动分割, 本文方法具有速度快、可重复性高和分割结果相对客观等优点. 首先, 计算乳腺DCE-MRI图像的MRF能量, 以增强目标区域与周围背景的差异. 其次, 在能量图中计算每个像素点的后验概率, 建立基于后验概率驱动的活动轮廓模型区域项. 最后, 结合Gabor纹理特征、DCE-MRI时域特征和灰度特征构建模糊速度函数, 将其引入到活动轮廓模型中作为边缘检测项. 在乳腺癌灶边界处, 该速度函数趋向于零, 活动轮廓曲线停止演变, 完成对乳腺癌灶的分割. 实验结果表明, 所提出的方法有助于乳腺癌灶在DCE-MRI图像中的准确分割.     

pSnakes: A new radial active contour model and its application in the segmentation of the left ventricle from echocardiographic images

Active contours are image segmentation methods that minimize the total energy of the contour to be segmented. Among the active contour methods, the radial methods have lower computational complexity and can be applied in real time. This work aims to present a new radial active contour technique, called pSnakes, using the 1D Hilbert transform as external energy. The pSnakes method is based on the fact that the beams in ultrasound equipment diverge from a single point of the probe, thus enabling the use of polar coordinates in the segmentation. The control points or nodes of the active contour are obtained in pairs and are called twin nodes. The internal energies as well as the external one, Hilbertian energy, are redefined. The results showed that pSnakes can be used in image segmentation of short-axis echocardiogram images and that they were effective in image segmentation of the left ventricle. The echo-cardiologist's golden standard showed that the pSnakes was the best method when compared with other methods. The main contributions of this work are the use of pSnakes and Hilbertian energy, as the external energy, in image segmentation. The Hilbertian energy is calculated by the 1D Hilbert transform. Compared with traditional methods, the pSnakes method is more suitable for ultrasound images because it is not affected by variations in image contrast, such as noise. The experimental results obtained by the left ventricle segmentation of echocardiographic images demonstrated the advantages of the proposed model. The results presented in this paper are justified due to an improved performance of the Hilbert energy in the presence of speckle noise.     

Hybrid Active Contour Mammographic Mass Segmentation and Classification

This research implements a novel segmentation of mammographic mass. Three methods are proposed, namely, segmentation of mass based on iterative active contour, automatic region growing, and fully automatic mask selection-based active contour techniques. In the first method, iterative threshold is performed for manual cropped preprocessed image, and active contour is applied thereafter. To overcome manual cropping in the second method, an automatic seed selection followed by region growing is performed. Given that the result is only a few images owing to over segmentation, the third method uses a fully automatic active contour. Results of the segmentation techniques are compared with the manual markup by experts, specifically by taking the difference in their mean values. Accordingly, the difference in the mean value of the third method is 1.0853, which indicates the closeness of the segmentation. Moreover, the proposed method is compared with the existing fuzzy C means and level set methods. The automatic mass segmentation based on active contour technique results in segmentation with high accuracy. By using adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system, classification is done and results in a sensitivity of 94.73%, accuracy of 93.93%, and Mathew’s correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.876.     

Automatic Segmentation of the Left Ventricle in Cardiac MR and CT Images

This paper describes a segmentation technique to automatically extract the myocardium in 4D cardiac MR and CT datasets. The segmentation algorithm is a two step process. The global localization step roughly localizes the left ventricle using techniques such as maximum discrimination, thresholding and connected component analysis. The local deformations step combines EM-based region segmentation and Dijkstra active contours using graph cuts, spline fitting, or point pattern matching. The technique has been tested on a large number of patients and both quantitative and qualitative results are presented.     

基于局部与全局拟合的活动轮廓模型

针对局部二值拟合(LBF)模型容易陷入能量泛函局部极小值的问题,提出基于局部与全局拟合的活动轮廓模型。引入一个衡量某点处局部区域内灰度分布是否均匀的特征函数,将LBF模型中的局部拟合项与CV模型中的全局拟合项相结合,同时保留LBF模型分割灰度不均匀图像和CV模型全局收敛性的优点。实验结果表明,该模型能够分割灰度不均匀图像,对初始轮廓的依赖性较弱,并且具有一定的抗噪性。