Medical image analysis
-
This paper proposes a novel method for MRI denoising that exploits both the sparseness and self-similarity properties of the MR images. The proposed method is a two-stage approach that first filters the noisy image using a non local PCA thresholding strategy by automatically estimating the local noise level present in the image and second uses this filtered image as a guide image within a rotationally invariant non-local means filter. The proposed method internally estimates the amount of local noise presents in the images that enables applying it automatically to images with spatially varying noise levels and also corrects the Rician noise induced bias locally. The proposed approach has been compared with related state-of-the-art methods showing competitive results in all the studied cases.
-
Medical image analysis · Oct 2014
High-resolution dynamic MR imaging of the thorax for respiratory motion correction of PET using groupwise manifold alignment.
Respiratory motion is a complicating factor in PET imaging as it leads to blurring of the reconstructed images which adversely affects disease diagnosis and staging. Existing motion correction techniques are often based on 1D navigators which cannot capture the inter- and intra-cycle variabilities that may occur in respiration. MR imaging is an attractive modality for estimating such motion more accurately, and the recent emergence of hybrid PET/MR systems allows the combination of the high molecular sensitivity of PET with the versatility of MR. ⋯ On synthetic data with a known ground truth our proposed technique produces significantly better reconstructions than all other examined techniques. On real data without a known ground truth the method gives the most plausible reconstructions and high consistency of reconstruction. Lastly, we demonstrate how our method can be applied for the respiratory motion correction of simulated PET/MR data.
-
Medical image analysis · Aug 2014
A generative probability model of joint label fusion for multi-atlas based brain segmentation.
Automated labeling of anatomical structures in medical images is very important in many neuroscience studies. Recently, patch-based labeling has been widely investigated to alleviate the possible mis-alignment when registering atlases to the target image. However, the weights used for label fusion from the registered atlases are generally computed independently and thus lack the capability of preventing the ambiguous atlas patches from contributing to the label fusion. ⋯ The patch dependencies will be further recursively updated based on the latest labeling results to correct the possible labeling errors, which falls to the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework. To demonstrate the labeling performance, we have comprehensively evaluated our patch-based labeling method on the whole brain parcellation and hippocampus segmentation. Promising labeling results have been achieved with comparison to the conventional patch-based labeling method, indicating the potential application of the proposed method in the future clinical studies.
-
Medical image analysis · Jul 2014
Body-wide hierarchical fuzzy modeling, recognition, and delineation of anatomy in medical images.
To make Quantitative Radiology (QR) a reality in radiological practice, computerized body-wide Automatic Anatomy Recognition (AAR) becomes essential. With the goal of building a general AAR system that is not tied to any specific organ system, body region, or image modality, this paper presents an AAR methodology for localizing and delineating all major organs in different body regions based on fuzzy modeling ideas and a tight integration of fuzzy models with an Iterative Relative Fuzzy Connectedness (IRFC) delineation algorithm. The methodology consists of five main steps: (a) gathering image data for both building models and testing the AAR algorithms from patient image sets existing in our health system; (b) formulating precise definitions of each body region and organ and delineating them following these definitions; (c) building hierarchical fuzzy anatomy models of organs for each body region; (d) recognizing and locating organs in given images by employing the hierarchical models; and (e) delineating the organs following the hierarchy. ⋯ Some sparse objects - venous system (in the thorax on CT), inferior vena cava (in the abdomen on CT), and mandible and naso-pharynx (in neck on MRI, but not on CT) - pose challenges at all levels, leading to poor recognition and/or delineation results. The AAR method fares quite favorably when compared with methods from the recent literature for liver, kidneys, and spleen on CT images. We conclude that separation of modality-independent from dependent aspects, organization of objects in a hierarchy, encoding of object relationship information explicitly into the hierarchy, optimal threshold-based recognition learning, and fuzzy model-based IRFC are effective concepts which allowed us to demonstrate the feasibility of a general AAR system that works in different body regions on a variety of organs and on different modalities.
-
Medical image analysis · Jul 2014
Joint maximum likelihood estimation of activation and Hemodynamic Response Function for fMRI.
Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) maps the brain activity by measuring blood oxygenation level, which is related to brain activity via a temporal impulse response function known as the Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF). The HRF varies from subject to subject and within areas of the brain, therefore a knowledge of HRF is necessary for accurately computing voxel activations. Conversely a knowledge of active voxels is highly beneficial for estimating the HRF. ⋯ The method is analyzed under both white noise and colored noise. Experiments with synthetic data show that accurate estimation of the HRF is possible with this method without prior assumptions on the exact shape of the HRF. Further experiments involving real fMRI experiments with auditory stimuli are used to validate the proposed method.