模糊K-均值聚类算法及其在磁共振颅脑图像分割中的应用研究

目的　介绍一种动态模糊聚类算法并利用该算法对磁共振图像进行分割研究。方法　首先对磁共振颅脑图像进行预处理去掉颅骨和肌肉等非脑组织,只保留大脑组织,然后利用模糊Ｋ－ 均值聚类算法计算脑白质、脑灰质和脑脊液的模糊类属函数。结果　模糊Ｋ－ 均值聚类算法能很好地分割出磁共振颅脑图像中的灰质、白质和脑脊液。结论　利用模糊Ｋ－ 均值聚类算法分割磁共振颅脑图像能获得较好的分割效果。     

模糊K—均聚类算法及其在磁共振颅脑图像分割中的应用研究

目的 介绍一种动态模糊聚类算法并和该算法对磁共振图像进行分割研究。方法 首先对磁共振颅脑图像进行预处理去掉颅骨和肌肉等非脑组织,只保留大脑组织,然后利用模糊Ｋ－均值聚类算法计算脑白质、脑灰质和脑脊液的模糊类属函数。结果 模糊Ｋ－均值聚类算法能很好地分割出磁共振颅脑图像中的灰质、白质和脑脊液。结论 利用模糊Ｋ－均值聚类算法分割磁共振颅脑图像能获得较好的分割效果。     

点对称距离模糊C均值聚类算法在脑部MRI图像分割中的应用

背景:在传统的图像分割方法中,模糊C均值聚类算法应用十分广泛。目的:将改进的模糊C均值聚类算法应用到MRI图像的分割中,提高MRI图像分割的准确度。方法:针对传统的基于Minkowski距离的模糊C均值聚类算法,提出了基于点对称距离的模糊C均值聚类算法,并将其运用到了脑部MRI图像分割中。结果与结论:实验结果表明,与模糊C均值聚类算法相比,点对称距离的模糊C均值聚类算法有明显的优势。     

点对称距离模糊C均值聚类算法在脑部MRI图像分割中的应用

背景：在传统的图像分割方法中,模糊C均值聚类算法应用十分广泛。目的：将改进的模糊C均值聚类算法应用到MRI图像的分割中,提高MRI图像分割的准确度。方法：针对传统的基于Minkowski距离的模糊C均值聚类算法,提出了基于点对称距离的模糊C均值聚类算法,并将其运用到了脑部MRI图像分割中。结果与结论：实验结果表明,与模糊C均值聚类算法相比,点对称距离的模糊C均值聚类算法有明显的优势。     

基于K-Means及K-NN的磁共振颅脑图像分割初探

目的对K-均值聚类(K-Means)和K-最近邻规则(K-NN)方法在MR颅脑图像分割中的应用进行研究,分析二者优缺点并提出改进。方法利用K-Means算法和K-NN算法对脑组织进行分割。为了减少人脑的劳动使算法自动进行,提出使用K-Means方法提取K-NN方法的训练样本。结果 K-Means与K-NN及改良后的K-NN算法(KMN)能很好地从大脑结构中分割白质(white matter,WM)、灰质(grey matter,GM)和脑脊液(cerebrospinal fluid,CSF)。结论实验表明K-Means与K-NN能快速有效地分割脑组织,改进后的K-NN方法减少了人工参与,并能获得较好的分割效果。     

功能磁共振图像小波域分析结果的修正

目的改进f MRI数据小波域分析方法。方法通过在原始空间域对传统小波方法检测出的激活区再进行检验来修正传统小波方法的缺点,并以SPM99为标准,通过比较传统小波方法和修正方法对一组手动实验数据的分析结果来说明修正方法的效果。结果修正方法能较好地除去或减小传统小波方法中激活区的扩散和伪影。结论小波域分析f MRI图像是一种快速灵敏的方法,但重建后激活区扩散且有伪影。本文提出的修正方法是一种快速且较传统小波方法准确的f MRI数据分析方法。     

基于小波变换和高斯差分冷冻电镜生物大分子图像的自动分割

冷冻电镜生物大分子图像分割是进行冷冻电镜生物大分子颗粒识别的基础.文章分析了冷冻电镜生物大分子图像的主要特点,提出了基于小波变换和高斯差分的冷冻电镜生物大分子图像自动分割方法.该方法利用小波变换得到原图像的低分辨率图像,抑制了噪声,提高了图像的对比度;同时采用高斯差分算子解决了图像亮度不均匀的问题,并对高斯差分图像采用基于灰度梯度信息融合的分割方法.实验结果表明,该算法能有效的减少噪声对边缘提取的影响,分割效果良好,是一种全新的冷冻电镜生物大分子图像自动分割算法.     

基于非冗余平移不变小波变换的磁共振图像降噪

背景:MRI成像机制决定了其时间/空间分辨率和信噪比之间存在矛盾,因此图像降噪变得十分必要.目前基于离散小波变换的降噪方法广泛应用,然而存在平移敏感性的缺陷.目前已出现了克服平移敏感性的离散小波变换,但其冗余性导致计算复杂度的快速增加.目的:针对图像降噪设计小波滤波器,减小降采样过程的影响,保持离散小波变换的非冗余性,并针对MRI图像Rician噪声的降噪进行分析.方法:由于平移敏感性主要是由于离散小波变换分解时降采样产生的混叠项带来的,在保证非冗余的前提下,提出了通过减小混叠项的影响来减小平移敏感性.在此基础上,设计了一个双正交小波.最后,将其以常见的阈值降噪方法应用到磁共振图像Rician噪声的降噪中.结果与结论:文章提出了设计小波滤波器的新方法,即满足严格重构条件外满足一些附加要求,最后将设计过程简化为一个有约束条件的最优化过程.将设计的双正交小波应用于MR图像,仿真结果表明降噪效果较通常小波有所改善,间接表明了设计思路和方法的有效性.     

基于各向异性扩散和小波变换的磁共振图像降噪和增强方法

降噪是医学图像处理中一个非常重要的问题,传统去噪方法在降低噪声的同时会模糊图像的边缘,各向异性扩散滤波在降低图像噪声的同时能够使图像的边缘得到保持.利用小波变换可以对图像进行多尺度分解,使我们可以在不同尺度上对图像进行处理.本文利用各向异性扩散滤波对MRI图像进行降噪,然后利用平稳小波变换对图像进行增强处理.实验结果表明,该方法在有效去除噪声的同时能够增强图像的细节,有效地提高了图像的质量.     

MRI图像的小波融合处理

背景:小波图像融合是将两幅图像融合在一起,以获取对同一场景的更为精确、全面、可靠的图像描述.目的:用小波变换图像融合技术融合MRI脑梗死图像,以恢复缺损图像.方法:图像融合的主要机制是利用二维小波分析法对MRI脑梗死图像进行小波分解,并对高低频信号采用多种融合方式进行融合.通过对比不同融合方式后的效果图,找出最适合本部位MRI图像的融合方法.结果与结论:不同方式的融合技术能成功修复不同的缺损部位,多种融合方式的合适组合能完全修复多处缺失部位.对于文中给出的MRI脑梗死图像,采用最小值融合方式的融合效果最好.提示使用二维小波分析法处理医学图像,简便快捷,能有效改善图像的视觉效果,辅助临床诊断.     

Breast tumor classification using fuzzy clustering for breast elastography

Elastography is a new ultrasound imaging technique to provide the information about relative tissue stiffness. The elasticity information provided by this dynamic imaging method has proven to be helpful in distinguishing benign and malignant breast tumors. In previous studies for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), the tumor contour was manually segmented and each pixel in the elastogram was classified into hard or soft tissue using the simple thresholding technique. In this paper, the tumor contour was automatically segmented by the level set method to provide more objective and reliable tumor contour for CAD. Moreover, the elasticity of each pixel inside each tumor was classified by the fuzzy c-means clustering technique to obtain a more precise diagnostic result. The test elastography database included 66 benign and 31 malignant biopsy-proven tumors. In the experiments, the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and the area index Az under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the classification of solid breast masses were 83.5% (81/97), 83.9% (26/31), 83.3% (55/66) and 0.902 for the fuzzy c-means clustering method, respectively, and 59.8% (58/97), 96.8% (30/31), 42.4% (28/66) and 0.818 for the conventional thresholding method, respectively. The differences of accuracy, specificity and Az value were statistically significant (p < 0.05). We conclude that the proposed method has the potential to provide a CAD tool to help physicians to more reliably and objectively diagnose breast tumors using elastography.(E-mail: rfchang@csie.ntu.edu.tw)     

Automatic atlas-based three-label cartilage segmentation from MR knee images

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of joint disease and often characterized by cartilage changes. Accurate quantitative methods are needed to rapidly screen large image databases to assess changes in cartilage morphology. We therefore propose a new automatic atlas-based cartilage segmentation method for future automatic OA studies.Atlas-based segmentation methods have been demonstrated to be robust and accurate in brain imaging and therefore also hold high promise to allow for reliable and high-quality segmentations of cartilage. Nevertheless, atlas-based methods have not been well explored for cartilage segmentation. A particular challenge is the thinness of cartilage, its relatively small volume in comparison to surrounding tissue and the difficulty to locate cartilage interfaces – for example the interface between femoral and tibial cartilage.This paper focuses on the segmentation of femoral and tibial cartilage, proposing a multi-atlas segmentation strategy with non-local patch-based label fusion which can robustly identify candidate regions of cartilage. This method is combined with a novel three-label segmentation method which guarantees the spatial separation of femoral and tibial cartilage, and ensures spatial regularity while preserving the thin cartilage shape through anisotropic regularization. Our segmentation energy is convex and therefore guarantees globally optimal solutions.We perform an extensive validation of the proposed method on 706 images of the Pfizer Longitudinal Study. Our validation includes comparisons of different atlas segmentation strategies, different local classifiers, and different types of regularizers. To compare to other cartilage segmentation approaches we validate based on the 50 images of the SKI10 dataset.     

Multi-atlas segmentation with augmented features for cardiac MR images

Multi-atlas segmentation infers the target image segmentation by combining prior anatomical knowledge encoded in multiple atlases. It has been quite successfully applied to medical image segmentation in the recent years, resulting in highly accurate and robust segmentation for many anatomical structures. However, to guide the label fusion process, most existing multi-atlas segmentation methods only utilise the intensity information within a small patch during the label fusion process and may neglect other useful information such as gradient and contextual information (the appearance of surrounding regions). This paper proposes to combine the intensity, gradient and contextual information into an augmented feature vector and incorporate it into multi-atlas segmentation. Also, it explores the alternative to the K nearest neighbour (KNN) classifier in performing multi-atlas label fusion, by using the support vector machine (SVM) for label fusion instead. Experimental results on a short-axis cardiac MR data set of 83 subjects have demonstrated that the accuracy of multi-atlas segmentation can be significantly improved by using the augmented feature vector. The mean Dice metric of the proposed segmentation framework is 0.81 for the left ventricular myocardium on this data set, compared to 0.79 given by the conventional multi-atlas patch-based segmentation (Coupé et al., 2011; Rousseau et al., 2011). A major contribution of this paper is that it demonstrates that the performance of non-local patch-based segmentation can be improved by using augmented features.     

Modeling envelope statistics of blood and myocardium for segmentation of echocardiographic images

The objective of this study was to investigate the use of speckle statistics as a preprocessing step for segmentation of the myocardium in echocardiographic images. Three-dimensional (3D) and biplane image sequences of the left ventricle of two healthy children and one dog (beagle) were acquired. Pixel-based speckle statistics of manually segmented blood and myocardial regions were investigated by fitting various probability density functions (pdf). The statistics of heart muscle and blood could both be optimally modeled by a K-pdf or Gamma-pdf (Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit test). Scale and shape parameters of both distributions could differentiate between blood and myocardium. Local estimation of these parameters was used to obtain parametric images, where window size was related to speckle size (5 x 2 speckles). Moment-based and maximum-likelihood estimators were used. Scale parameters were still able to differentiate blood from myocardium; however, smoothing of edges of anatomical structures occurred. Estimation of the shape parameter required a larger window size, leading to unacceptable blurring. Using these parameters as an input for segmentation resulted in unreliable segmentation. Adaptive mean squares filtering was then introduced using the moment-based scale parameter (sigma(2)/mu) of the Gamma-pdf to automatically steer the two-dimensional (2D) local filtering process. This method adequately preserved sharpness of the edges. In conclusion, a trade-off between preservation of sharpness of edges and goodness-of-fit when estimating local shape and scale parameters is evident for parametric images. For this reason, adaptive filtering outperforms parametric imaging for the segmentation of echocardiographic images.     

基于MRI图像的主动脉分割与三维建模

目的基于MRI图像序列建立主动脉的三维几何模型并进行计算网格的划分,以用于主动脉血流动力学特性的模拟。方法采用心电R波触发和呼吸控制的方式在体扫描得到心动周期20个时相760幅MRI图像,利用Mimics软件对所获取的图像序列进行图像预处理、分割和三维重建,然后将所建立的三维模型导入到ADINA软件中进行计算网格的划分。结果建立了20个主动脉三维模型,分别代表主动脉在心动周期不同时相的状态,同时,还实现了计算网格的划分。结论该方法可得到进行主动脉血流动力学仿真所需的三维几何模型和计算网格;同时,该方法也可用于人体其他组织的三维建模和网格划分。     

Hippocampus segmentation in MR images using atlas registration, voxel classification, and graph cuts

Since hippocampal volume has been found to be an early biomarker for Alzheimer's disease, there is large interest in automated methods to accurately, robustly, and reproducibly extract the hippocampus from MRI data. In this work we present a segmentation method based on the minimization of an energy functional with intensity and prior terms, which are derived from manually labelled training images. The intensity energy is based on a statistical intensity model that is learned from the training images. The prior energy consists of a spatial and regularity term. The spatial prior is obtained from a probabilistic atlas created by registering the training images to the unlabelled target image, and deforming and averaging the training labels. The regularity prior energy encourages smooth segmentations. The resulting energy functional is globally minimized using graph cuts. The method was evaluated using image data from a population-based study on diseases among the elderly. Two set of images were used: a small set of 20 manually labelled MR images and a larger set of 498 images, for which manual volume measurements were available, but no segmentations. This data was previously used in a volumetry study that found significant associations between hippocampal volume and cognitive decline and incidence of dementia. Cross-validation experiments with the labelled set showed similarity indices of 0.852 and 0.864 and mean surface distances of 0.40 and 0.36 mm for the left and right hippocampus. 83% of the automated segmentations of the large set were rated as ‘good’ by a trained observer. Also, the proposed method was used to repeat the manual hippocampal volumetry study. The automatically obtained hippocampal volumes showed significant associations with cognitive decline and dementia, similar to the manually measured volumes. Finally, direct quantitative and qualitative comparisons showed that the proposed method outperforms a multi-atlas based segmentation method.     

A collaborative resource to build consensus for automated left ventricular segmentation of cardiac MR images

A collaborative framework was initiated to establish a community resource of ground truth segmentations from cardiac MRI. Multi-site, multi-vendor cardiac MRI datasets comprising 95 patients (73 men, 22 women; mean age 62.73 ± 11.24 years) with coronary artery disease and prior myocardial infarction, were randomly selected from data made available by the Cardiac Atlas Project (Fonseca et al., 2011). Three semi- and two fully-automated raters segmented the left ventricular myocardium from short-axis cardiac MR images as part of a challenge introduced at the STACOM 2011 MICCAI workshop (Suinesiaputra et al., 2012). Consensus myocardium images were generated based on the Expectation–Maximization principle implemented by the STAPLE algorithm (Warfield et al., 2004). The mean sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive and negative predictive values ranged between 0.63 and 0.85, 0.60 and 0.98, 0.56 and 0.94, and 0.83 and 0.92, respectively, against the STAPLE consensus. Spatial and temporal agreement varied in different amounts for each rater. STAPLE produced high quality consensus images if the region of interest was limited to the area of discrepancy between raters. To maintain the quality of the consensus, an objective measure based on the candidate automated rater performance distribution is proposed. The consensus segmentation based on a combination of manual and automated raters were more consistent than any particular rater, even those with manual input. The consensus is expected to improve with the addition of new automated contributions. This resource is open for future contributions, and is available as a test bed for the evaluation of new segmentation algorithms, through the Cardiac Atlas Project (www.cardiacatlas.org).     

Correlation based 3-D segmentation of the left ventricle in pediatric echocardiographic images using radio-frequency data

Clinical diagnosis of heart disease might be substantially supported by automated segmentation of the endocardial surface in three-dimensional (3-D) echographic images. Because of the poor echogenicity contrast between blood and myocardial tissue in some regions and the inherent speckle noise, automated analysis of these images is challenging. A priori knowledge on the shape of the heart cannot always be relied on, e.g., in children with congenital heart disease, segmentation should be based on the echo features solely. The objective of this study was to investigate the merit of using temporal cross-correlation of radio-frequency (RF) data for automated segmentation of 3-D echocardiographic images. Maximum temporal cross-correlation (MCC) values were determined locally from the RF-data using an iterative 3-D technique. MCC values as well as a combination of MCC values and adaptive filtered, demodulated RF-data were used as an additional, external force in a deformable model approach to segment the endocardial surface and were tested against manually segmented surfaces. Results on 3-D full volume images (Philips, iE33) of 10 healthy children demonstrate that MCC values derived from the RF signal yield a useful parameter to distinguish between blood and myocardium in regions with low echogenicity contrast and incorporation of MCC improves the segmentation results significantly. Further investigation of the MCC over the whole cardiac cycle is required to exploit the full benefit of it for automated segmentation.     

Landmarking and segmentation of computed tomographic images of pediatric patients with neuroblastoma

Objectives  Segmentation and landmarking of computed tomographic (CT) images of pediatric patients are important and useful in computer-aided diagnosis, treatment planning, and objective analysis of normal as well as pathological regions. Identification and segmentation of organs and tissues in the presence of tumors is difficult. Automatic segmentation of the primary tumor mass in neuroblastoma could facilitate reproducible and objective analysis of the tumor’s tissue composition, shape, and volume. However, due to the heterogeneous tissue composition of the neuroblastic tumor, ranging from low-attenuation necrosis to high-attenuation calcification, segmentation of the tumor mass is a challenging problem. In this context, we explore methods for identification and segmentation of several abdominal and thoracic landmarks to assist in the segmentation of neuroblastic tumors in pediatric CT images. Materials and methods  Methods are proposed to identify and segment automatically peripheral artifacts and tissues, the rib structure, the vertebral column, the spinal canal, the diaphragm, and the pelvic surface. The results of segmentation of the vertebral column, the spinal canal, the diaphragm and the pelvic girdle are quantitatively evaluated by comparing with the results of independent manual segmentation performed by a radiologist. Results and conclusion  The use of the landmarks and removal of several tissues and organs assisted in limiting the scope of the tumor segmentation process to the abdomen, and resulted in the reduction of the false-positive error rates by 22.4%, on the average, over ten CT exams of four patients, and improved the result of segmentation of neuroblastic tumors.