Texture Feature Based Analysis of Segmenting Soft Tissues from Brain CT Images using BAM type Artificial Neural Network

Soft tissues segmentation from brain computed tomography image data is an important but time consuming task performed manually by medical experts. Automating this process is challenging due to the high diversity in appearance of tumor tissue among different patients and in many cases, similarity between tumor and normal tissue. A computer software system is designed for the automatic segmentation  of brain CT images. Image analysis methods were applied to the images of 30 normal and 25 benign,25 malignant images. Textural features extracted from the gray level co-occurrence matrix of the brain CT images and bidirectional associative memory were employed for the design of the system. Best classification accuracy was achieved by four textural features and BAM type ANN classifier. The proposed system provides new textural information and segmenting normal and benign, malignant tumor images, especially in small tumor regions of CT images efficiently and accurately with lesser computational time. Keywords: Bidirectional Associative Memory classifier(BAM), Computed Tomography (CT), Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN)

IMAGE PROCESSING, SEGMENTATION AND MACHINE LEARNING MODELS TO CLASSIFY AND DELINEATE TUMOR VOLUMES TO SUPPORT MEDICAL DECISION

Techniques for processing and analysing images and medical data have become the main’s translational applications and researches in clinical and pre-clinical environments. The advantages of these techniques are the improvement of diagnosis accuracy and the assessment of treatment response by means of quantitative biomarkers in an efficient way. In the era of the personalized medicine, an early and efficacy prediction of therapy response in patients is still a critical issue. In radiation therapy planning, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides high quality detailed images and excellent soft-tissue contrast, while Computerized Tomography (CT) images provides attenuation maps and very good hard-tissue contrast. In this context, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a non-invasive imaging technique which has the advantage, over morphological imaging techniques, of providing functional information about the patient’s disease. In the last few years, several criteria to assess therapy response in oncological patients have been proposed, ranging from anatomical to functional assessments. Changes in tumour size are not necessarily correlated with changes in tumour viability and outcome. In addition, morphological changes resulting from therapy occur slower than functional changes. Inclusion of PET images in radiotherapy protocols is desirable because it is predictive of treatment response and provides crucial information to accurately target the oncological lesion and to escalate the radiation dose without increasing normal tissue injury. For this reason, PET may be used for improving the Planning Treatment Volume (PTV). Nevertheless, due to the nature of PET images (low spatial resolution, high noise and weak boundary), metabolic image processing is a critical task. The aim of this Ph.D thesis is to develope smart methodologies applied to the medical imaging field to analyse different kind of problematic related to medical images and data analysis, working closely to radiologist physicians. Various issues in clinical environment have been addressed and a certain amount of improvements has been produced in various fields, such as organs and tissues segmentation and classification to delineate tumors volume using meshing learning techniques to support medical decision. In particular, the following topics have been object of this study: • Technique for Crohn’s Disease Classification using Kernel Support Vector Machine Based; • Automatic Multi-Seed Detection For MR Breast Image Segmentation; • Tissue Classification in PET Oncological Studies; • KSVM-Based System for the Definition, Validation and Identification of the Incisinal Hernia Reccurence Risk Factors; • A smart and operator independent system to delineate tumours in Positron Emission Tomography scans; 3 • Active Contour Algorithm with Discriminant Analysis for Delineating Tumors in Positron Emission Tomography; • K-Nearest Neighbor driving Active Contours to Delineate Biological Tumor Volumes; • Tissue Classification to Support Local Active Delineation of Brain Tumors; • A fully automatic system of Positron Emission Tomography Study segmentation. This work has been developed in collaboration with the medical staff and colleagues at the: • Dipartimento di Biopatologia e Biotecnologie Mediche e Forensi (DIBIMED), University of Palermo • Cannizzaro Hospital of Catania • Istituto di Bioimmagini e Fisiologia Molecolare (IBFM) Centro Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) of Cefalù • School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology The proposed contributions have produced scientific publications in indexed computer science and medical journals and conferences. They are very useful in terms of PET and MRI image segmentation and may be used daily as a Medical Decision Support Systems to enhance the current methodology performed by healthcare operators in radiotherapy treatments. The future developments of this research concern the integration of data acquired by image analysis with the managing and processing of big data coming from a wide kind of heterogeneous sources

Overview of the ImageCLEFmed 2020 Concept Prediction Task: Medical Image Understanding

This paper describes the ImageCLEFmed 2020 Concept Detection Task. After first being proposed at ImageCLEF 2017, the medical task is in its 4th edition this year, as the automatic detection from medical images still remains a challenging task. In 2020, the format remained the same as in 2019, with a single sub-task. The concept detection task is part of the medical tasks, alongside the tuberculosis and visual question and answering tasks. Similar to the 2019 edition, the data set focuses on radiology images rather than biomedical images, however with an increased number of images. The distributed images were extracted from the biomedical open access literature (PubMed Central). The development data consists of 65,753 training and 15,970 validation images. Each image has corresponding Unified Medical Language System (UMLS™) concepts, that were extracted from the original article image captions. In this edition, additional imaging acquisition technique labels were included in the distributed data, which were adopted for pre-filtering steps, concept selection and ensemble algorithms. Most applied approaches for the automatic detection of concepts were deep learning based architectures. Long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNN), adversarial auto-encoder, convolutional neural networks (CNN) image encoders and transfer learning-based multi-label classification models were adopted. The performances of the submitted models (best score 0.3940) were evaluated using F1-scores computed per image and averaged across all 3,534 test images

A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

Deep learning algorithms, in particular convolutional networks, have rapidly become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. This paper reviews the major deep learning concepts pertinent to medical image analysis and summarizes over 300 contributions to the field, most of which appeared in the last year. We survey the use of deep learning for image classification, object detection, segmentation, registration, and other tasks and provide concise overviews of studies per application area. Open challenges and directions for future research are discussed.Comment: Revised survey includes expanded discussion section and reworked introductory section on common deep architectures. Added missed papers from before Feb 1st 201

Medical imaging analysis with artificial neural networks

Given that neural networks have been widely reported in the research community of medical imaging, we provide a focused literature survey on recent neural network developments in computer-aided diagnosis, medical image segmentation and edge detection towards visual content analysis, and medical image registration for its pre-processing and post-processing, with the aims of increasing awareness of how neural networks can be applied to these areas and to provide a foundation for further research and practical development. Representative techniques and algorithms are explained in detail to provide inspiring examples illustrating: (i) how a known neural network with fixed structure and training procedure could be applied to resolve a medical imaging problem; (ii) how medical images could be analysed, processed, and characterised by neural networks; and (iii) how neural networks could be expanded further to resolve problems relevant to medical imaging. In the concluding section, a highlight of comparisons among many neural network applications is included to provide a global view on computational intelligence with neural networks in medical imaging