Targeted vessel reconstruction in non‐contrast‐enhanced steady‐state free precession angiography

Image quality in non‐contrast‐enhanced (NCE) angiograms is often limited by scan time constraints. An effective solution is to undersample angiographic acquisitions and to recover vessel images with penalized reconstructions. However, conventional methods leverage penalty terms with uniform spatial weighting, which typically yield insufficient suppression of aliasing interference and suboptimal blood/background contrast. Here we propose a two‐stage strategy where a tractographic segmentation is employed to auto‐extract vasculature maps from undersampled data. These maps are then used to incur spatially adaptive sparsity penalties on vascular and background regions. In vivo steady‐state free precession angiograms were acquired in the hand, lower leg and foot. Compared with regular non‐adaptive compressed sensing (CS) reconstructions (CS_low), the proposed strategy improves blood/background contrast by 71.3 ± 28.9% in the hand (mean ± s.d. across acceleration factors 1–8), 30.6 ± 11.3% in the lower leg and 28.1 ± 7.0% in the foot (signed‐rank test, P < 0.05 at each acceleration). The proposed targeted reconstruction can relax trade‐offs between image contrast, resolution and scan efficiency without compromising vessel depiction. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于深度学习的颈动脉超声图像内中膜厚度测量

目的 颈动脉血管内中膜厚度(IMT)是衡量动脉粥样硬化程度的重要标准.一般采用人工标定进行测量,该过程耗时且繁琐,由此提出一种总体性能较好的全自动分割(AS)算法.方法 该算法首先利用卷积神经网络(CNN)识别出颈动脉血管远端,进而提取包含颈动脉内膜、中膜部分的感兴趣区域(ROI).采用基于堆栈式自编码器(SAE)构造的模式分类器将ROI中的像素进行分类.最后利用分类区域的面积信息和位置信息对分类结果进行甄别,运用曲线拟合提取边界完成测量任务.结果 针对本研究所用图像库中的84幅颈动脉超声图像进行实验,金标准(GT)由两名专家4次测量的平均值产生,其与AS之间的绝对误差和标准差为(13.3±20.5) μm,协方差系数为0.990 7.结论 实验结果表明,此算法总体性能较好,能够实现超声颈动脉血管内中膜全自动、快速、准确分割,从而满足临床需要.     

Discrimination between glioblastoma multiforme and solitary metastasis using morphological features derived from the p:q tensor decomposition of diffusion tensor imaging

The management and treatment of high‐grade glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and solitary metastasis (MET) are very different and influence the prognosis and subsequent clinical outcomes. In the case of a solitary MET, diagnosis using conventional radiology can be equivocal. Currently, a definitive diagnosis is based on histopathological analysis on a biopsy sample. Here, we present a computerised decision support framework for discrimination between GBM and solitary MET using MRI, which includes: (i) a semi‐automatic segmentation method based on diffusion tensor imaging; (ii) two‐dimensional morphological feature extraction and selection; and (iii) a pattern recognition module for automated tumour classification. Ground truth was provided by histopathological analysis from pre‐treatment stereotactic biopsy or at surgical resection. Our two‐dimensional morphological analysis outperforms previous methods with high cross‐validation accuracy of 97.9% and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.975 using a neural networks‐based classifier. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

live wire算法中局部代价计算的加速改进

目的加快livewire算法中局部代价权值的计算速度,提升算法的运行效率。方法提出利用计算相关性同步计算相邻节点的梯度方向权值代价分量^,以及只计算最短路径搜索中已排序节点相对于邻域节点的权值代价两种方法改进局部代价算法。结果改进算法对于不同图像空间分辨率的情况,代价权值的计算量,livewire算法的运行时间以及交互分割时间上,相比较其他两种算法都有一定程度的减少。结论改进代价计算方式的livewire算法,能够正确分割目标图像,在高图像分辨率的情况下明显提高了交互分割速度。     

一种用于医学图像分割算法验证的模拟图像生成方法

目的 医学图像分割是计算机辅助诊断与治疗的基础技术,对各种自动分割算法性能的验证极为重要;但是临床图像无法直接提供“金标准”,亟需解决导致验证所需的测试数据难以量化评估的问题.方法 使用傅里叶描述子作为描述临床图像中待分割区域轮廓的函数,通过对傅里叶描述子的抽样生成新的轮廓,最后使用纹理匹配技术计算新图像中像素点的灰度值.结果 针对颅内出血的图像,以生成的模拟图像作为测试图像,对多阈值分割和水平集分割算法的精确性和准确性进行了定量的验证.结论 实验表明本方法能够快速地生成逼真的模拟医学图像,对分割算法的验证具有很强的实用性.     

Application of Morphological Bit Planes in Retinal Blood Vessel Extraction

The appearance of the retinal blood vessels is an important diagnostic indicator of various clinical disorders of the eye and the body. Retinal blood vessels have been shown to provide evidence in terms of change in diameter, branching angles, or tortuosity, as a result of ophthalmic disease. This paper reports the development for an automated method for segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. A unique combination of methods for retinal blood vessel skeleton detection and multidirectional morphological bit plane slicing is presented to extract the blood vessels from the color retinal images. The skeleton of main vessels is extracted by the application of directional differential operators and then evaluation of combination of derivative signs and average derivative values. Mathematical morphology has been materialized as a proficient technique for quantifying the retinal vasculature in ocular fundus images. A multidirectional top-hat operator with rotating structuring elements is used to emphasize the vessels in a particular direction, and information is extracted using bit plane slicing. An iterative region growing method is applied to integrate the main skeleton and the images resulting from bit plane slicing of vessel direction-dependent morphological filters. The approach is tested on two publicly available databases DRIVE and STARE. Average accuracy achieved by the proposed method is 0.9423 for both the databases with significant values of sensitivity and specificity also; the algorithm outperforms the second human observer in terms of precision of segmented vessel tree.     

基于单水平集函数的细胞分割算法

目的：由于细胞图像十分复杂,传统的基于像素或者边界的图像分割方法难以精确的实现细胞分割。因此,需要设计一种可以实现细胞图像精确分割的方法。方法：结合大津分割算法和主动轮廓模型的优点,设计出一种基于单水平集函数的细胞分割算法,首先对细胞图像大津分割,其结果作为水平集函数的初始值,然后使用迭代法对水平集函数演化。采用MATLAB对显微镜下获取的细胞图像进行试验,将本文改进后的算法与常规的算法进行了对比。结果：与传统的水平集分割算法相比,本文方法对细胞图像分割结果更加准确,迭代次数减少一半左右,因此分割时间也减少了一半左右。结论：结合细胞图像的结构特点,利用大津分割结果作为主动轮廓模型的初始值,可有效解决主动轮廓模型因为初始值设置不当导致的分割缺陷问题,水平集函数能够跟踪拓扑结构变化,具有计算精度高、算法稳定、优化边界清晰光滑等优点,在本文中得到了充分的应用。因此本文所提出的算法能够高效地实现细胞图像的分割。     

A novel region-based level set method initialized with mean shift clustering for automated medical image segmentation

Appropriate initialization and stable evolution are desirable criteria to satisfy in level set methods. In this study, a novel region-based level set method utilizing both global and local image information complementarily is proposed. The global image information is extracted from mean shift clustering without any prior knowledge. Appropriate initial contours are obtained by regulating the clustering results. The local image information, as extracted by a data fitting energy, is employed to maintain a stable evolution of the zero level set curves. The advantages of the proposed method are as follows. First, the controlling parameters of the evolution can be easily estimated by the clustering results. Second, the automaticity of the model increases because of a reduction in computational cost and manual intervention. Experimental results confirm the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method for medical image segmentation.     

基于Metropolis—SA算法的脑部磁共振血管造影图像分割

目的利用三维Markov随机场（MRF）模型分割脑部磁共振血管造影（MRA）。方法MRF的似然概率采用了瑞利分布和高斯混合分布函数,并利用最大期望（EM）算法精确估计出混合参数;先验概率采用Ising—MRF模型,并利用误差试探法估计出正则化参数。为避免利用迭代条件模式（ICM）进行图像分割时常陷入局部最优解,实验提出了基于Metropolis采样算法的模拟退火（SA）技术。结果实现了三维MRF的全局最优解,分割模型可分辨3个体素的细小血管。临床数据采用南方医院影像中心提供的患者TOF-MRA数据（1.5TGE MRI scanner）,空间分辨率0．43mm×0．43mm×0．50mm：原始数据的像素空间大小为512×512×128;实际采用的空间大小和分辨率分别为256×256×64和0．80mm×0．80mm×1．20mm。实验对每一套临床数据采用SA、ICM、MSA算法分别进行分割比较,分割结果存在有限差异,采用15步迭代计算的时间消耗分别为1029S、463S、560S。结论实验通过三维仿真数据分割结果表明,Metropolis—SA迭代求解算法能够实现更低的全局误差．并且实际脑部MRA数据的分割与最大密度投影相比较．反映出较好效果．