Ovarian ultrasound image analysis: follicle segmentation

Ovarian ultrasound is an effective tool in infertility treatment. Repeated measurements of the size and shape of follicles over several days are the primary means of evaluation by physicians. Currently, follicle wall segmentation is achieved by manual tracing which is time consuming and susceptible to inter-operator variation. An automated method for follicle wall segmentation is reported that uses a four-step process based on watershed segmentation and knowledge-based graph search algorithm which utilizes priori information about follicle structure for inner and outer wall detection. The automated technique was tested on 36 ultrasonographic images of women's ovaries. Validation against manually traced borders has shown good correlation of manually defined and computer-determined area measurements (R2 = 0.85 - 0.96). The border positioning errors were small: 0.63+/-0.36 mm for inner border and 0.67+/-0.41 mm for outer border detection. The use of watershed segmentation and graph search methods facilitates fast, accurate inner and outer border detection with minimal user-interaction.     

Left ventricular deformation recovery from cine MRI using an incompressible model

This paper presents a method for 3-D deformation recovery of the left ventricular (LV) wall from anatomical cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The method is based on a deformable model that is incompressible, a desired property since the myocardium has been shown to be nearly incompressible. The LV wall needs to be segmented in an initial frame after which the method automatically determines the deformation everywhere in the LV wall throughout the cardiac cycle. Two studies were conducted to validate the method. In the first study, the deformation recovered from a 3-D anatomical cine MRI of a healthy volunteer was compared against the manual segmentation of the LV wall and against the corresponding 3-D tagged cine MRI. The average volume agreement between the model and the manual segmentation had a false positive rate of 3%, false negative rate of 3%, and true positive rate of 93%. The average distance between the model and manually determined intersections of perpendicular tag planes was 1.6 mm (1.1 pixel). Another set of 3-D anatomical and tagged MRI scans was taken of the same volunteer four months later. The method was applied to the second set and the recovered deformation was very similar to the one obtained from the first set. In the second study, the method was applied to 3-D anatomical cine MRI scans of three patients with ventricular dyssynchrony and three age-matched healthy volunteers. The LV wall deformations recovered for the three normals agreed well and the recovered strains were similar to those reported by other researchers for normal subjects. Strains and displacements of the three patients were clearly smaller than those of the three normals indicating reduced cardiac function. The deformation recovered for the three normals and the three patients was validated against manual segmentation and corresponding tag cine MRI scans and the agreement was similar to that of the first validation study.     

Multiresolution texture segmentation with application to diagnostic ultrasound images

A multiresolution texture segmentation (MTS) approach to image segmentation that addresses the issues of texture characterization, image resolution, and time to complete the segmentation is presented. The approach generalizes the conventional simulated annealing method to a multiresolution framework and minimizes an energy function that is dependent on the resolution of the size of the texture blocks in an image. A rigorous experimental procedure is also proposed to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed MTS approach on the accuracy of the segmentation, the efficiency of the algorithm, and the use of varying features at different resolution. Semireal images, created by sampling a series of diagnostic ultrasound images of an ovary in vitro, were tested to produce statistical measures on the performance of the approach. The ultrasound images themselves were then segmented to determine if the approach can achieve accurate results for the intended ultrasound application. Experimental results suggest that the MTS approach converges faster and produces better segmentation results than the single-level approach.     

Improving lung region segmentation accuracy in chest X-ray images using a two-model deep learning ensemble approach

We propose a deep learning framework to improve segmentation accuracy of the lung region in Chest X-Ray (CXR) images. The proposed methodology implements a “divide and conquer” strategy where the original CXRs are subdivided into smaller image patches, segmented them individually, and then reassembled to achieve the complete segmentation. This approach ensembles two models, the first of which is a traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) used to classify the image patches and subsequently merge them to obtain a pre-segmentation. The second model is a modified U-Net architecture to segment the patches and subsequently combines them to obtain another pre-segmented image. These two pre-segmented images are combined using a binary disjunction operation to get the initial segmentation, which is later post-processed to obtain the final segmentation. The post-processing steps consist of traditional image processing techniques such as erosion, dilation, connected component labeling, and region-filling algorithms. The robustness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated using two public (MC, JPCL) and one proprietary (The University of Texas Medical Branch - UTMB) datasets of CXR images. The proposed framework outperformed many state-of-the-arts competitions presented in the literature.     

An adaptive window-setting scheme for segmentation of bladder tumor surface via MR cystography

This paper proposes an adaptive window-setting scheme for noninvasive detection and segmentation of bladder tumor surface in T(1)-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images. The inner border of the bladder wall is first covered by a group of ball-shaped detecting windows with different radii. By extracting the candidate tumor windows and excluding the false positive (FP) candidates, the entire bladder tumor surface is detected and segmented by the remaining windows. Different from previous bladder tumor detection methods that are mostly focusing on the existence of a tumor, this paper emphasizes segmenting the entire tumor surface in addition to detecting the presence of the tumor. The presented scheme was validated by ten clinical T(1)-weighted MR image datasets (five volunteers and five patients). The bladder tumor surfaces and the normal bladder wall inner borders in the ten datasets were covered by 223 and 10,491 windows, respectively. Such a large number of the detecting windows makes the validation statistically meaningful. In the FP reduction step, the best feature combination was obtained by using receiver operating characteristics or ROC analysis. The validation results demonstrated the potential of this presented scheme in segmenting the entire tumor surface with high sensitivity and low FP rate. This study inherits our previous results of automatic segmentation of the bladder wall and will be an important element in our MR-based virtual cystoscopy or MR cystography system.     

A novel iris segmentation using radial-suppression edge detection

Iris segmentation is a key step in the iris recognition system. The conventional methods of iris segmentation are based on the assumption that the inner and outer boundaries of an iris can be taken as circles. The region of the iris is segmented by detecting the circular inner and outer boundaries. However, we investigate the iris boundaries in the CASIA-IrisV3 database, and find that the actual iris boundaries are not always circular. In order to solve this problem, a new approach for iris segmentation based on radial-suppression edge detection is proposed in this paper. In the radial-suppression edge detection, a non-separable wavelet transform is used to extract the wavelet transform modulus of the iris image. Then, a new method of radial non-maxima suppression is proposed to retain the annular edges and simultaneously remove the radial edges. Next, a thresholding operation is utilized to remove the isolated edges and produce the final binary edge map. Based on the binary edge map, a self-adaptive method of iris boundary detection is proposed to produce final iris boundaries. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed iris segmentation is desirable.     

基于多尺度多方向Gabor变换的Tsallis熵阈值分割方法

为了能在统一框架内处理无模态、单模态、双模态或者多模态直方图情形下的自动阈值选取问题,该文提出一种基于多尺度多方向Gabor变换的Tsallis熵阈值分割方法(MGTE)。该方法先通过Gabor变换得到多尺度乘积图像,然后利用内外轮廓图像从多尺度乘积图像中重构1维直方图,并在重构1维直方图上采用Tsallis熵计算模型来选取4个方向Tsallis熵取最大值时对应的阈值,最后对4个方向的阈值进行加权求和作为最终分割阈值。将提出的方法和5个分割方法在4幅合成图像和40幅真实世界图像上进行了实验。结果表明提出的方法虽然计算效率不占优势,但它的分割适应性和分割精度有明显的提高。     

Semi-supervised cardiac MRI image of the left ventricle segmentation algorithm based on contrastive learning

A semi-supervised convolutional neural network segmentation method of medical images based on contrastive learning is proposed. The cardiac magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) images to be segmented are preprocessed to obtain positive and negative samples by labels. The U-Net shrinks network is applied to extract features of the positive samples, negative samples, and input samples. In addition, an unbalanced contrastive loss function is proposed, which is weighted with the binary cross-entropy loss...     

Constrained detection of left ventricular boundaries from cine CT images of human hearts

Detection of the left ventricular (LV) endocardial (inner) and epicardial (outer) boundaries in cardiac images, provided by fast computer tomography (cine CT), magnetic resonance (MR), or ultrasound (echocardiography), is addressed. The automatic detection of the LV boundaries is difficult due to background noise, poor contrast, and often unclear differentiation of the tissue characteristics of the ventricles, papillary muscles, and surrounding tissues. An approach to the automatic ventricular boundary detection that employs set-theoretic techniques, and is based on incorporating a priori knowledge of the heart geometry, its brightness, spatial structure, and temporal dynamics into the boundaries detection algorithm is presented. Available knowledge is interpreted as constraint sets in the functional space, and the consistent boundaries are considered to belong to the intersection of all the introduced sets, thus satisfying the a priori information. An algorithm is also suggested for the simultaneous detection of the endocardial and epicardial boundaries of the LV. The procedure is demonstrated using cine CT images of the human heart.     

Left Ventricle Segmentation Using Model Fitting and Active Surfaces

A method to perform 4D (3D over time) seg mentation of the left ventricle of a mouse heart using a set of B mode cine slices acquired in vivo from a series of short axis scans is described. We incorporate previ ously suggested methods such as temporal propagation, the gradient vector flow active surface, superquadric models, etc. into our proposed 4D segmentation of the left ventricle. The contributions of this paper are incor poration of a novel despeckling method and the use of locally fitted superellipsoid models to provide a better initialization for the active surface segmentation algorithm. Average distances of the improved surface segmentation to a manually segmented surface through out the entire cardiac cycle and cross-sectional contours are provided to demonstrate the improvements pro duced by the proposed 4D segmentation.     

Semiautomated border tracking of cine echocardiographic ventnrcular images

Two-dimensional ultrasound sector scans of the left ventricle (LV) are commonly used to diagnose cardiac mechanical function. Present quantification procedures of wall motion by this technique entail inaccuracies, mainly due to relatively poor image quality and the absence of a definition of the relative position of the probe and the heart. The poor quality dictates subjective determination of the myocardial edges, while the absence of a position vector increases the errors in the calculations of wall displacement, LV blood volume, and ejection fraction. An improved procedure is proposed here for automatic myocardial border tracking (AMBT) of the endocardial and epicardial edges in a sequence of video images. The procedure includes nonlinear filtering of whole images, debiasing of gray levels, and location-dependent contrast stretching. The AMBT algorithm is based upon tracking movement of a small number of predefined set of points, which are manually defined on the two myocardial borders. Information from one image is used, by utilizing predetermined statistical criteria to iteratively search and detect the border points on the next one. Border contours are reconstructed by Spline interpolation of the border points. The AMBT procedure is tested by comparing processed sequences of cine echocardiographic scan images to manual tracings by an objective observer and to results from previously published data.     

Shape statistics variational approach for the outer contour segmentation of left ventricle MR images.

Segmentation of left ventricles is one of the important research topics in cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. The segmentation precision influences the authenticity of ventricular motion reconstruction. In left ventricle MR images, the weak and broken boundary increases the difficulty of segmenting the outer contour precisely. In this paper, we present an improved shape statistics variational approach for the outer contour segmentation of left ventricle MR images. We use the Mumford-Shah model in an object feature space and incorporate the shape statistics and an edge image to the variational framework. The introduction of shape statistics can improve the segmentation with broken boundaries. The edge image can enhance the weak boundary and thus improve the segmentation precision. The generation of the object feature image, which has homogenous "intensities" in the left ventricle, facilitates the application of the Mumford-Shah model. A comparison of mean absolute distance analysis between different contours generated with our algorithm and that generated by hand demonstrated that our method can achieve a higher segmentation precision and a better stability than various approaches. It is a semiautomatic way for the segmentation of the outer contour of the left ventricle in clinical applications.     

Accuracy of automatically determined borders in digital two-dimensional echocardiography using a cardiac phantom

Although two-dimensional echocardiography (2-D echo) is a useful technique for evaluation of global and regional left ventricular function, the main limitation is the inability to easily extract reliable and accurate quantitative information throughout all phases of the cardiac cycle. We sought to develop suitable automated techniques for the objective determination of endocardial and epicardial borders in two-dimensional echocardiographic images. To test algorithms for the automatic detection of myocardial borders we constructed a cardiac ultrasound phantom consisting of 16 echogenic annuli of known dimensions embedded in a material of low echogenicity which allowed imaging without partial volume effects. An algorithm based on Gaussian filtering followed by a difference gradient operator was applied to detect edges in the 2-D echo images of these annuli. The radii of the automatically determined inner borders were within 0.44 mm root meansquared error over a range of 15-25 mm true radius. This lower boundary for the error in our approach to automatic placement of myocardial borders in 2-D echocardiograms suggests the potential to extract more information concerning left ventricular function than is available with current techniques.     

Semiautomated segmentation of myocardial contours for fast strain analysis in cine displacement-encoded MRI

The purposes of this study were to develop a semiautomated cardiac contour segmentation method for use with cine displacement-encoded MRI and evaluate its accuracy against manual segmentation. This segmentation model was designed with two distinct phases: preparation and evolution. During the model preparation phase, after manual image cropping and then image intensity standardization, the myocardium is separated from the background based on the difference in their intensity distributions, and the endo- and epi-cardial contours are initialized automatically as zeros of an underlying level set function. During the model evolution phase, the model deformation is driven by the minimization of an energy function consisting of five terms: model intensity, edge attraction, shape prior, contours interaction, and contour smoothness. The energy function is minimized iteratively by adaptively weighting the five terms in the energy function using an annealing algorithm. The validation experiments were performed on a pool of cine data sets of five volunteers. The difference between the semiautomated segmentation and manual segmentation was sufficiently small as to be considered clinically irrelevant. This relatively accurate semiautomated segmentation method can be used to significantly increase the throughput of strain analysis of cine displacement-encoded MR images for clinical applications.      

Reproducibility of Laplacian Wall Thickness Measurements of the Gallbladder with Varying CT Slice Thickness

In measuring changes of gallbladder wall thickness using CT, robustness to differences in acquisition protocols including slice thickness can be important. We have developed an automated technique based on Laplace’s equation to measure the gallbladder wall thickness using computer tomography (CT). The purpose of this work is to investigate the usefulness of the Laplacian technique in obtaining gallbladder wall thickness measurements that are reproducible with variations in CT slice thickness. This study included 2D (2D) and 3D (3D) wall thickness measurements using Laplace’s equation. Ten subjects who had 5 mm (thick) and 2.5 mm (thin) reconstruction (from a single set of raw data) through the abdomen were randomly selected from a research database. Their volumetric CT images were acquired using a multidetector GE MEDICAL SYSTEMS–LightSpeed 16 scanner at 120 KVP, ~250 mAs, with standard filter reconstruction algorithm and manually segmented on all CT cross sections by a radiologist. The inner and outer boundaries of the gallbladder wall were obtained from the segmentation. The thickness of the wall was quantified by computing the distance between the boundaries for each scan and over the entire volume using Laplace’s equation from mathematical physics. The distance between the surfaces is found by computing normalized gradients that form a vector field. The vector fields represent tangent vectors along field lines connecting both boundaries. The Laplacian technique was compared with the conventional Euclidean distance transformation (EDT) technique using coefficient of variation. EDT results in an Euclidean distance mapping between the two extracted surfaces. Both techniques were compared in 2D and 3D. For the 2D and 3D wall thickness measurements, a mean difference of 0.35 and 0.25 mm between thin and thick reconstruction was found respectively using Laplace’s equation. EDT resulted in a higher mean difference for both 2D and 3D. In addition, a significant difference in thickness between the Laplacian technique and EDT techniques (p?<?0.001) were obtained. The Laplacian measurement of gallbladder wall showed significantly lower variation compared to EDT on different CT slice thickness for both 2D and 3D techniques. Hence, proving to be an important technique for obtaining reproducible wall thickness measurements of the gallbladder using CT.     

A new model-based framework for lung tissue segmentation in three-dimensional thoracic CT images

A new framework for model-based lung tissue segmentation in three-dimensional thoracic CT images is proposed. In the first stage, a parametric model for lung segmenting surface is created using shape representation based on level sets method. This model is constituted by the sum of a mean distance function and a number of weighted eigenshapes. Consequently, unlike the other model-based segmentation methods, there is no need to specify any marker point in this model. In the second stage, the segmenting surface is varied so as to be matched with the binarized input image. For this purpose, a region-based energy function is minimized with respect to the parameters including the weights of eigenshapes and coefficients of a three-dimensional similarity transform. Finally, the resulted segmenting surface is post-processed in order to improve its fitness with the lung borders of the input image. The experimental results demonstrated the outperformance of the proposed framework over its model-based counterparts in model matching stage. Moreover, it performed slightly better in terms of final segmentation results.     

Automatic segmentation of color images with transitive closure

In this paper, a mask based automatic segmentation algorithm for color images which uses pixel similarity has been presented. Main concept of the algorithm relies on spatial mask for course segmentation and the Warshall's transitive closure (TC) computation algorithm for region merging. Although the proposed spatial mask approach reduces the computational burden required for segmentation or clustering techniques such as seeded region growing (SRG) or fuzzy c-means (FCM) in which user supplied parameters are essential, it has over segmentation drawback. Therefore, the transitive closure algorithm, which uses adjacency and similarity matrix associated to undirected graph of the over segmented image, has been employed to merge the regions. After comparing to existing methods, the obtained experimental results confirmed that the color images as well as gray level images could be segmented with considerable accuracy. Also computational complexity of image segmentation is significantly reduced. Furthermore, there is no need any user supplied parameter such as the number of clusters or seed points.     

Segmentation of intravascular ultrasound images: a knowledge-based approach

Intravascular ultrasound imaging of coronary arteries provides important information about coronary lumen, wall, and plaque characteristics. Quantitative studies of coronary atherosclerosis using intravascular ultrasound and manual identification of wall and plaque borders are limited by the need for observers with substantial experience and the tedious nature of manual border detection. We have developed a method for segmentation of intravascular ultrasound images that identifies the internal and external elastic laminae and the plaque-lumen interface. The border detection algorithm was evaluated in a set of 38 intravascular ultrasound images acquired from fresh cadaveric hearts using a 30 MHz imaging catheter. To assess the performance of our border detection method we compared five quantitative measures of arterial anatomy derived from computer-detected borders with measures derived from borders manually defined by expert observers. Computer-detected and observer-defined lumen areas correlated very well (r=0.96, y=1.02x+0.52), as did plaque areas (r=0.95, y=1.07x-0.48), and percent area stenosis (r=0.93, y=0.99x-1.34.) Computer-derived segmental plaque thickness measurements were highly accurate. Our knowledge-based intravascular ultrasound segmentation method shows substantial promise for the quantitative analysis of in vivo intravascular ultrasound image data.     

A MRF model-based segmentation approach to classification formultispectral imagery

An unsupervised segmentation approach to classification of multispectral image is suggested here in Markov random field (MRF) frame work. This work generalizes the work of Sarkar et al. (2000) on gray value images for multispectral images and is extended for landuse classification. The essence of this approach is based on capturing intrinsic characters of tonal and textural regions of any multispectral image. The approach takes an initially oversegmented image and the original. multispectral image as the input and defines a MRF over region adjacency graph (RAG) of the initially segmented regions. Energy function minimization associated with the MRF is carried out by applying a multivariate statistical test. A cluster validation scheme is outlined after obtaining optimal segmentation. Quantitative evaluation of classification accuracy of test data for three illustrations are shown and compared with conventional maximum likelihood procedure. Comparison of the proposed methodology with a recent work of texture segmentation in the literature has also been provided. The findings of the proposed method are found to be encouraging     

基于图割和视域相关性的立体图像分割

立体图像分割是对象基立体图像处理中的关键和难点。基于改进Grabcut图割算法和视域相关性,提出一种新的立体图像分割算法。首先基于改进Slic方法将左图像转换成超像素图像,然后基于Grabcut框架通过重新定义能量函数对其分割以提取出左图像目标。最后,基于左右图像的视域相关性通过融合颜色和纹理特征的轮廓匹配提取右图像目标。实验结果表明,与现有方法相比,所提算法能获得更高的分割效率和更准确的分割结果。