Estimating the granularity coefficient of a Potts-Markov random field within an MCMC algorithm

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the Potts parameter B jointly with the unknown parameters of a Bayesian model within a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Standard MCMC methods cannot be applied to this problem because performing inference on B requires computing the intractable normalizing constant of the Potts model. In the proposed MCMC method the estimation of B is conducted using a likelihood-free Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Experimental results obtained for synthetic data show that estimating B jointly with the other unknown parameters leads to estimation results that are as good as those obtained with the actual value of B. On the other hand, assuming that the value of B is known can degrade estimation performance significantly if this value is incorrect. To illustrate the interest of this method, the proposed algorithm is successfully applied to real bidimensional SAR and tridimensional ultrasound images

Multi-observation PET image analysis for patient follow-up quantitation and therapy assessment.: Multi observation PET image fusion for patient follow-up quantitation and therapy response

International audienceIn positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, an early therapeutic response is usually characterized by variations of semi-quantitative parameters restricted to maximum SUV measured in PET scans during the treatment. Such measurements do not reflect overall tumor volume and radiotracer uptake variations. The proposed approach is based on multi-observation image analysis for merging several PET acquisitions to assess tumor metabolic volume and uptake variations. The fusion algorithm is based on iterative estimation using a stochastic expectation maximization (SEM) algorithm. The proposed method was applied to simulated and clinical follow-up PET images. We compared the multi-observation fusion performance to threshold-based methods, proposed for the assessment of the therapeutic response based on functional volumes. On simulated datasets the adaptive threshold applied independently on both images led to higher errors than the ASEM fusion and on clinical datasets it failed to provide coherent measurements for four patients out of seven due to aberrant delineations. The ASEM method demonstrated improved and more robust estimation of the evaluation leading to more pertinent measurements. Future work will consist in extending the methodology and applying it to clinical multi-tracer datasets in order to evaluate its potential impact on the biological tumor volume definition for radiotherapy applications

Hyperspectral image unmixing using a multiresolution sticky HDP

This paper is concerned with joint Bayesian endmember extraction and linear unmixing of hyperspectral images using a spatial prior on the abundance vectors.We propose a generative model for hyperspectral images in which the abundances are sampled from a Dirichlet distribution (DD) mixture model, whose parameters depend on a latent label process. The label process is then used to enforces a spatial prior which encourages adjacent pixels to have the same label. A Gibbs sampling framework is used to generate samples from the posterior distributions of the abundances and the parameters of the DD mixture model. The spatial prior that is used is a tree-structured sticky hierarchical Dirichlet process (SHDP) and, when used to determine the posterior endmember and abundance distributions, results in a new unmixing algorithm called spatially constrained unmixing (SCU). The directed Markov model facilitates the use of scale-recursive estimation algorithms, and is therefore more computationally efficient as compared to standard Markov random field (MRF) models. Furthermore, the proposed SCU algorithm estimates the number of regions in the image in an unsupervised fashion. The effectiveness of the proposed SCU algorithm is illustrated using synthetic and real data