RESUMEN
The unsupervised segmentation method proposed in the current study follows the evolutional ability of human vision to extrapolate significant structures in an image. In this work we adopt the perceptual grouping strategy by selecting the spectral clustering framework, which is known to capture perceptual organization features, as well as by developing similarity models according to Gestaltic laws of visual segregation. Our proposed framework applies but is not limited to the detection of cells and organelles in microscopic images and attempts to provide an effective alternative to presently dominating manual segmentation and tissue classification practice. The main theoretical contribution of our work resides in the formulation of robust similarity models which automatically adapt to the statistical structure of the biological domain and return optimal performance in pixel classification tasks under the wide variety of distributional assumptions.
Asunto(s)
Interpretación de Imagen Asistida por Computador/métodos , Mitocondrias , Imagen Molecular/métodos , Algoritmos , Animales , Análisis por Conglomerados , Microscopía Electrónica , Reconocimiento de Normas Patrones Automatizadas/métodos , SciuridaeRESUMEN
Modern medical imaging modalities provide large amounts of information in both the spatial and temporal domains and the incorporation of this information in a coherent algorithmic framework is a significant challenge. In this paper, we present a novel and intuitive approach to combine 3-D spatial and temporal (3-D + time) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data in an integrated segmentation algorithm to extract the myocardium of the left ventricle. A novel level-set segmentation process is developed that simultaneously delineates and tracks the boundaries of the left ventricle muscle. By encoding prior knowledge about cardiac temporal evolution in a parametric framework, an expectation-maximization algorithm optimally tracks the myocardial deformation over the cardiac cycle. The expectation step deforms the level-set function while the maximization step updates the prior temporal model parameters to perform the segmentation in a nonrigid sense.
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Algoritmos , Ventrículos Cardíacos/anatomía & histología , Aumento de la Imagen/métodos , Interpretación de Imagen Asistida por Computador/métodos , Imagenología Tridimensional/métodos , Imagen por Resonancia Cinemagnética/métodos , Reconocimiento de Normas Patrones Automatizadas/métodos , Inteligencia Artificial , Simulación por Computador , Humanos , Modelos Anatómicos , Modelos Biológicos , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y EspecificidadRESUMEN
Computed tomography colonography (CTC) is a rapidly evolving noninvasive medical investigation that is viewed by radiologists as a potential screening technique for the detection of colorectal polyps. Due to the technical advances in CT system design, the volume of data required to be processed by radiologists has increased significantly, and as a consequence the manual analysis of this information has become an increasingly time consuming process whose results can be affected by inter- and intrauser variability. The aim of this paper is to detail the implementation of a fully integrated CAD-CTC system that is able to robustly identify the clinically significant polyps in the CT data. The CAD-CTC system described in this paper is a multistage implementation whose main system components are: 1) automatic colon segmentation; 2) candidate surface extraction; 3) feature extraction; and 4) classification. Our CAD-CTC system performs at 100% sensitivity for polyps larger than 10 mm, 92% sensitivity for polyps in the range 5 to 10 mm, and 57.14% sensitivity for polyps smaller than 5 mm with an average of 3.38 false positives per dataset. The developed system has been evaluated on synthetic and real patient CT data acquired with standard and low-dose radiation levels.
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Algoritmos , Inteligencia Artificial , Pólipos del Colon/diagnóstico por imagen , Colonografía Tomográfica Computarizada/métodos , Imagenología Tridimensional/métodos , Reconocimiento de Normas Patrones Automatizadas/métodos , Interpretación de Imagen Radiográfica Asistida por Computador/métodos , Humanos , Dosis de Radiación , Intensificación de Imagen Radiográfica/métodos , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y EspecificidadRESUMEN
The aim of this paper is to present the development of a synthetic phantom that can be used for the selection of optimal scanning parameters in computed tomography (CT) colonography. In this paper we attempt to evaluate the influence of the main scanning parameters including slice thickness, reconstruction interval, field of view, table speed and radiation dose on the overall performance of a computer aided detection (CAD)-CTC system. From these parameters the radiation dose received a special attention, as the major problem associated with CTC is the patient exposure to significant levels of ionising radiation. To examine the influence of the scanning parameters we performed 51 CT scans where the spread of scanning parameters was divided into seven different protocols. A large number of experimental tests were performed and the results analysed. The results show that automatic polyp detection is feasible even in cases when the CAD-CTC system was applied to low dose CT data acquired with the following protocol: 13 mAs/rotation with collimation of 1.5 mm x 16 mm, slice thickness of 3.0mm, reconstruction interval of 1.5 mm, table speed of 30 mm per rotation. The CT phantom data acquired using this protocol was analysed by an automated CAD-CTC system and the experimental results indicate that our system identified all clinically significant polyps (i.e. larger than 5 mm).
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Colonografía Tomográfica Computarizada/instrumentación , Colonografía Tomográfica Computarizada/métodos , Fantasmas de Imagen , Intensificación de Imagen Radiográfica/instrumentación , Intensificación de Imagen Radiográfica/métodos , Diseño de Equipo , Análisis de Falla de Equipo , Garantía de la Calidad de Atención de Salud/métodos , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y EspecificidadRESUMEN
In this paper we describe the development of a computationally efficient computer-aided detection (CAD) algorithm based on the evaluation of the surface morphology that is employed for the detection of colonic polyps in computed tomography (CT) colonography. Initial polyp candidate voxels were detected using the surface normal intersection values. These candidate voxels were clustered using the normal direction, convexity test, region growing and Gaussian distribution. The local colonic surface was classified as polyp or fold using a feature normalized nearest neighborhood classifier. The main merit of this paper is the methodology applied to select the robust features derived from the colon surface that have a high discriminative power for polyp/fold classification. The devised polyp detection scheme entails a low computational overhead (typically takes 2.20min per dataset) and shows 100% sensitivity for phantom polyps greater than 5mm. It also shows 100% sensitivity for real polyps larger than 10mm and 91.67% sensitivity for polyps between 5 to 10mm with an average of 4.5 false positives per dataset. The experimental data indicates that the proposed CAD polyp detection scheme outperforms other techniques that identify the polyps using features that sample the colon surface curvature especially when applied to low-dose datasets.
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Pólipos del Colon/diagnóstico por imagen , Colonografía Tomográfica Computarizada/métodos , Algoritmos , Colon/diagnóstico por imagen , Humanos , Fantasmas de Imagen , Interpretación de Imagen Radiográfica Asistida por ComputadorRESUMEN
Frequently MRI data is characterised by a relatively low signal to noise ratio (SNR) or contrast to noise ratio (CNR). When developing automated Computer Assisted Diagnostic (CAD) techniques the errors introduced by the image noise are not acceptable. Thus, to limit these errors, a solution is to filter the data in order to increase the SNR. More importantly, the image filtering technique should be able to reduce the level of noise, but not at the expense of feature preservation. In this paper we detail the implementation of a number of 3D diffusion-based filtering techniques and we analyse their performance when they are applied to a large collection of MR datasets of varying type and quality.
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Imagen de Difusión por Resonancia Magnética/métodos , Algoritmos , Humanos , Imagenología Tridimensional , Distribución Normal , Intensificación de Imagen RadiográficaRESUMEN
The microstructure of protein networks in yogurts defines important physical properties of the yogurt and hereby partly its quality. Imaging this protein network using confocal scanning laser microscopy (CSLM) has shown good results, and CSLM has become a standard measuring technique for fermented dairy products. When studying such networks, hundreds of images can be obtained, and here image analysis methods are essential for using the images in statistical analysis. Previously, methods including gray level co-occurrence matrix analysis and fractal analysis have been used with success. However, a range of other image texture characterization methods exists. These methods describe an image by a frequency distribution of predefined image features (denoted textons). Our contribution is an investigation of the choice of image analysis methods by performing a comparative study of 7 major approaches to image texture description. Here, CSLM images from a yogurt fermentation study are investigated, where production factors including fat content, protein content, heat treatment, and incubation temperature are varied. The descriptors are evaluated through nearest neighbor classification, variance analysis, and cluster analysis. Our investigation suggests that the texton-based descriptors provide a fuller description of the images compared to gray-level co-occurrence matrix descriptors and fractal analysis, while still being as applicable and in some cases as easy to tune.
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Fermentación , Manipulación de Alimentos/métodos , Microscopía Confocal/métodos , Temperatura , Yogur/análisis , Animales , Productos Lácteos/análisis , Femenino , Humanos , Leche/químicaRESUMEN
A free visual programming-based image analysis development environment for medical imaging applications called NeatVision was developed to provide high-level access to a wide range of image processing algorithms through a well-defined, easy-to-use graphical interface. The system contains over 300 image manipulation, processing, and analysis algorithms. For more advanced users, an upgrade path is provided to extend the core library with use of the developer's interface, giving users access to additional plug-in features, automatic source code generation, compilation with full error feedback, and dynamic algorithm updates. NeatVision was designed to allow users at all levels of expertise to focus on the computer vision design task for computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) applications rather than the subtleties of a particular programming language. The environment allows the designers of image analysis-based CAD techniques to implement their ideas in a dynamic and straightforward manner. Both NeatVision standard and developer's versions can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet and can run on a variety of computer platforms.
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Diagnóstico por Computador/métodos , Imagenología Tridimensional , Radiografía/métodos , Radiología/métodos , Programas Informáticos , Informática MédicaRESUMEN
In this paper, we investigate the segmentation of closed contours in subcellular data using a framework that primarily combines the pairwise affinity grouping principles with a graph partitioning contour searching approach. One salient problem that precluded the application of these methods to large scale segmentation problems is the onerous computational complexity required to generate comprehensive representations that include all pairwise relationships between all pixels in the input data. To compensate for this problem, a practical solution is to reduce the complexity of the input data by applying an over-segmentation technique prior to the application of the computationally demanding strands of the segmentation process. This approach opens the opportunity to build specific shape and intensity models that can be successfully employed to extract the salient structures in the input image which are further processed to identify the cycles in an undirected graph. The proposed framework has been applied to the segmentation of mitochondria membranes in electron microscopy data which are characterized by low contrast and low signal-to-noise ratio. The algorithm has been quantitatively evaluated using two datasets where the segmentation results have been compared with the corresponding manual annotations. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been measured using standard metrics, such as precision and recall, and the experimental results indicate a high level of segmentation accuracy.
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Algoritmos , Interpretación de Imagen Asistida por Computador/métodos , Microscopía Electrónica/métodos , Membranas Mitocondriales/ultraestructura , Reconocimiento de Normas Patrones Automatizadas/métodos , Técnica de Sustracción , Inteligencia Artificial , Células Cultivadas , Humanos , Aumento de la Imagen/métodos , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y EspecificidadRESUMEN
The aim of this paper is to detail the development of a novel tracking framework that is able to extract the cell motility indicators and to determine the cellular division (mitosis) events in large time-lapse phase-contrast image sequences. To address the challenges induced by nonstructured (random) motion, cellular agglomeration, and cellular mitosis, the process of automatic (unsupervised) cell tracking is carried out in a sequential manner, where the interframe cell association is achieved by assessing the variation in the local cellular structures in consecutive frames of the image sequence. In our study, a strong emphasis has been placed on the robust use of the topological information in the cellular tracking process and in the development of targeted pattern recognition techniques that were designed to redress the problems caused by segmentation errors, and to precisely identify mitosis using a backward (reversed) tracking strategy. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on dense phase-contrast cellular data and the experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is able to accurately track epithelial and endothelial cells in time-lapse image sequences that are characterized by low contrast and high level of noise. Our algorithm achieved 86.10% overall tracking accuracy and 90.12% mitosis detection accuracy.
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Rastreo Celular/métodos , Procesamiento de Imagen Asistido por Computador/métodos , Microscopía de Contraste de Fase/métodos , Mitosis/fisiología , Imagen de Lapso de Tiempo/métodos , Algoritmos , Animales , Perros , Células HeLa , Células Endoteliales de la Vena Umbilical Humana , Humanos , Células de Riñón Canino Madin DarbyRESUMEN
Histogram transformation defines a class of image processing operations that are widely applied in the implementation of data normalization algorithms. In this paper, we present a new variational approach for image enhancement that is constructed to alleviate the intensity saturation effects that are introduced by standard contrast enhancement (CE) methods based on histogram equalization. In this paper, we initially apply total variation (TV) minimization with a L(1) fidelity term to decompose the input image with respect to cartoon and texture components. Contrary to previous papers that rely solely on the information encompassed in the distribution of the intensity information, in this paper, the texture information is also employed to emphasize the contribution of the local textural features in the CE process. This is achieved by implementing a nonlinear histogram warping CE strategy that is able to maximize the information content in the transformed image. Our experimental study addresses the CE of a wide variety of image data and comparative evaluations are provided to illustrate that our method produces better results than conventional CE strategies.
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Algoritmos , Interpretación de Imagen Asistida por Computador/métodos , Imagenología Tridimensional/métodos , Reconocimiento de Normas Patrones Automatizadas/métodos , Interpretación Estadística de Datos , Aumento de la Imagen/métodos , Análisis Numérico Asistido por Computador , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y EspecificidadRESUMEN
A common approach to model-based segmentation is to assume a top-down modelling strategy. However, this is not feasible for complex 3D +time structures, such as the cardiac left ventricle, due to increased training requirements, aligning difficulties and local minima in resulting models. As our main contribution, we present an alternate bottom-up modelling approach. By combining the variation captured in multiple dimensionally-targeted models at segmentation-time we create a scalable segmentation framework that does not suffer from the "curse of dimensionality." Our second contribution involves a flexible contour coupling technique that allows our segmentation method to adapt to unseen contour configurations outside the training set. This is used to identify the endo- and epicardium contours of the left ventricle by coupling them at segmentation-time, instead of at model-time. We apply our approach to 33 3D +time cardiac MRI datasets and perform comprehensive evaluation against several state-of-the-art works. Quantitative evaluation illustrates that our method requires significantly less training than state-of-the-art model-based methods, while maintaining or improving segmentation accuracy.
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Algoritmos , Corazón/anatomía & histología , Procesamiento de Imagen Asistido por Computador/métodos , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética/métodos , Adolescente , Niño , Preescolar , Ventrículos Cardíacos/anatomía & histología , Humanos , Modelos Teóricos , Análisis de Regresión , Función Ventricular/fisiologíaRESUMEN
The process required to track cellular structures is a key task in the study of cell migration. This allows the accurate estimation of motility indicators that help in the understanding of mechanisms behind various biological processes. This paper reports a particle-based fully automatic tracking framework that is able to quantify the motility of living cells in time-lapse images. Contrary to the standard tracking methods based on predefined motion models, in this paper we reformulate the tracking mechanism as a data driven optimization process to remove its reliance on a priory motion models. The proposed method has been evaluated using 2D and 3D deconvolved epifluorescent in-vivo image sequences that describe the development of the quail embryo.
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Microscopía/métodos , Procesamiento de Señales Asistido por Computador , Algoritmos , Animales , Movimiento Celular , Procesamiento Automatizado de Datos , Colorantes Fluorescentes/farmacología , Proteínas Fluorescentes Verdes/metabolismo , Procesamiento de Imagen Asistido por Computador , Imagenología Tridimensional/métodos , Microscopía Fluorescente/métodos , Modelos Estadísticos , Modelos Teóricos , Movimiento (Física) , CodornizRESUMEN
In this paper, we treat the problem of reducing the false positives (FP) in the automatic detection of colorectal polyps at Computer Aided Detection in Computed Tomography Colonography (CAD-CTC) as a shape-filtering task. From the extracted candidate surface, we obtain a reliable shape distribution function and analyse it in the Fourier domain and use the resulting spectral data to classify the candidate surface as belonging to a polyp or a non-polyp class. The developed shape filtering scheme is computationally efficient (takes approximately 2 seconds per dataset to detect the polyps from the colonic surface) and offers robust polyp detection with an overall false positive rate of 5.44 per dataset at a sensitivity of 100% for polyps greater than 10 mm when it was applied to standard and low dose CT data.
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Algoritmos , Inteligencia Artificial , Pólipos del Colon/diagnóstico por imagen , Colonografía Tomográfica Computarizada/métodos , Reconocimiento de Normas Patrones Automatizadas/métodos , Intensificación de Imagen Radiográfica/métodos , Interpretación de Imagen Radiográfica Asistida por Computador/métodos , Análisis por Conglomerados , Reacciones Falso Positivas , Humanos , Reproducibilidad de los Resultados , Sensibilidad y EspecificidadRESUMEN
In this paper we describe the development of a computationally efficient computer-aided detection (CAD) algorithm based on the statistical features derived from the local colonic surface that are used for the detection of colonic polyps in computed tomography (CT) colonography. The candidate surface voxels were detected and clustered using the surface normal intersection, convexity test, region growing and Hough Transform. The main objective of this paper is the selection of the statistical features that optimally capture the convexity of the candidate surface and consequently provide a high discrimination between local surfaces defined by polyps and folds. The developed polyp detection scheme is computationally efficient (typically takes 3.9 minute per dataset) and shows 100% sensitivity for phantom polyps greater than 5mm and 87.5% sensitivity for real polyps greater than 5mm with an average of 4.05 false positives per dataset.
RESUMEN
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to determine the feasibility of using computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) techniques to automatically identify, localize, and measure body fat tissue from a rapid whole-body MRI examination. CONCLUSION: Whole-body MRI in conjunction with CAD allows a fast, automatic, and accurate approach to body fat measurement and localization and can be a useful alternative to body mass index. Whole-body fat analysis can be achieved in less than 5 min.