Contrast Driven Elastica for Image Segmentation.

Minimization of boundary curvature is a classic regularization technique for image segmentation in the presence of noisy image data. Techniques for minimizing curvature have historically been derived from gradient descent methods which could be trapped by a local minimum and, therefore, required a good initialization. Recently, combinatorial optimization techniques have overcome this barrier by providing solutions that can achieve a global optimum. However, curvature regularization methods can fail when the true object has high curvature. In these circumstances, existing methods depend on a data term to overcome the high curvature of the object. Unfortunately, the data term may be ambiguous in some images, which causes these methods also to fail. To overcome these problems, we propose a contrast driven elastica model (including curvature), which can accommodate high curvature objects and an ambiguous data model. We demonstrate that we can accurately segment extremely challenging synthetic and real images with ambiguous data discrimination, poor boundary contrast, and sharp corners. We provide a quantitative evaluation of our segmentation approach when applied to a standard image segmentation data set.

Automatic Segmentation of Spinal Canals in CT Images via Iterative Topology Refinement.

Accurate segmentation of the spinal canals in computed tomography (CT) images is an important task in many related studies. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method and apply it to our highly challenging image cohort that is acquired from multiple clinical sites and from the CT channel of the PET-CT scans. To this end, we adapt the interactive random-walk solvers to be a fully automatic cascaded pipeline. The automatic segmentation pipeline is initialized with robust voxelwise classification using Haar-like features and probabilistic boosting tree. Then, the topology of the spinal canal is extracted from the tentative segmentation and further refined for the subsequent random-walk solver. In particular, the refined topology leads to improved seeding voxels or boundary conditions, which allow the subsequent random-walk solver to improve the segmentation result. Therefore, by iteratively refining the spinal canal topology and cascading the random-walk solvers, satisfactory segmentation results can be acquired within only a few iterations, even for cases with scoliosis, bone fractures and lesions. Our experiments validate the capability of the proposed method with promising segmentation performance, even though the resolution and the contrast of our dataset with 110 patient cases (90 for testing and 20 for training) are low and various bone pathologies occur frequently.

Learning the manifold of quality ultrasound acquisition.

Ultrasound acquisition is a challenging task that requires simultaneous adjustment of several acquisition parameters (the depth, the focus, the frequency and its operation mode). If the acquisition parameters are not properly chosen, the resulting image will have a poor quality and will degrade the patient diagnosis and treatment workflow. Several hardware-based systems for autotuning the acquisition parameters have been previously proposed, but these solutions were largely abandoned because they failed to properly account for tissue inhomogeneity and other patient-specific characteristics. Consequently, in routine practice the clinician either uses population-based parameter presets or manually adjusts the acquisition parameters for each patient during the scan. In this paper, we revisit the problem of autotuning the acquisition parameters by taking a completely novel approach and producing a solution based on image analytics. Our solution is inspired by the autofocus capability of conventional digital cameras, but is significantly more challenging because the number of acquisition parameters is large and the determination of "good quality" images is more difficult to assess. Surprisingly, we show that the set of acquisition parameters which produce images that are favored by clinicians comprise a 1D manifold, allowing for a real-time optimization to maximize image quality. We demonstrate our method for acquisition parameter autotuning on several live patients, showing that our system can start with a poor initial set of parameters and automatically optimize the parameters to produce high quality images.