An improved joint optimization of multiple level set functions for the segmentation of overlapping cervical cells

In this paper, we present an improved algorithm for the segmentation of cytoplasm and nuclei from clumps of overlapping cervical cells. This problem is notoriously difficult because of the degree of overlap among cells, the poor contrast of cell cytoplasm and the presence of mucus, blood, and inflammatory cells. Our methodology addresses these issues by utilizing a joint optimization of multiple level set functions, where each function represents a cell within a clump, that have both unary (intracell) and pairwise (intercell) constraints. The unary constraints are based on contour length, edge strength, and cell shape, while the pairwise constraint is computed based on the area of the overlapping regions. In this way, our methodology enables the analysis of nuclei and cytoplasm from both free-lying and overlapping cells. We provide a systematic evaluation of our methodology using a database of over 900 images generated by synthetically overlapping images of free-lying cervical cells, where the number of cells within a clump is varied from 2 to 10 and the overlap coefficient between pairs of cells from 0.1 to 0.5. This quantitative assessment demonstrates that our methodology can successfully segment clumps of up to 10 cells, provided the overlap between pairs of cells is <0.2. Moreover, if the clump consists of three or fewer cells, then our methodology can successfully segment individual cells even when the overlap is ∼0.5. We also evaluate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on a set of 16 extended depth of field images, where we are able to segment a total of 645 cells, of which only ∼10% are free-lying. Finally, we demonstrate that our method of cell nuclei segmentation is competitive when compared with the current state of the art.Zhi Lu, Gustavo Carneiro, and Andrew P. Bradle

SEPARATION OF OVERLAPPING OBJECT SEGMENTATION USING LEVEL SET WITH AUTOMATIC INITALIZATION ON DENTAL PANORAMIC RADIOGRAPH

To extract features on dental objects, it is necessary to segment the teeth. Segmentation is separating between the teeth (objects) with another part than teeth (background). The process of segmenting individual teeth has done a lot of the recently research and obtained good results. However, when faced with overlapping teeth, this is quite challenging. Overlapping tooth segmentation using the latest algorithm produces an object that should be segmented into two objects, instantly becoming one object. This is due to the overlapping between two teeth. To separate overlapping teeth, it is necessary to extract the overlapping object first. Level set method is widely used to segment overlap objects, but it has a limitation that needs to define the initial level set method manually by the user. In this study, an automatic initialization strategy is proposed for the level set method to segment overlapping teeth using hierarchical cluster analysis on dental panoramic radiographs images. The proposed strategy was able to initialize overlapping objects properly with accuracy of 73%.  Evaluation to measure quality of segmentation result are using misscassification error (ME) and relative foreground area error (RAE). ME and RAE were calculated based on the average results of individual tooth segmentation and obtain 16.41% and 52.14%, respectively. This proposed strategy are expected to be able to help separate the overlapping teeth for human age estimation through dental images in forensic odontology

CPP-Net: Context-aware Polygon Proposal Network for Nucleus Segmentation

Nucleus segmentation is a challenging task due to the crowded distribution and blurry boundaries of nuclei. Recent approaches represent nuclei by means of polygons to differentiate between touching and overlapping nuclei and have accordingly achieved promising performance. Each polygon is represented by a set of centroid-to-boundary distances, which are in turn predicted by features of the centroid pixel for a single nucleus. However, using the centroid pixel alone does not provide sufficient contextual information for robust prediction. To handle this problem, we propose a Context-aware Polygon Proposal Network (CPP-Net) for nucleus segmentation. First, we sample a point set rather than one single pixel within each cell for distance prediction. This strategy substantially enhances contextual information and thereby improves the robustness of the prediction. Second, we propose a Confidence-based Weighting Module, which adaptively fuses the predictions from the sampled point set. Third, we introduce a novel Shape-Aware Perceptual (SAP) loss that constrains the shape of the predicted polygons. Here, the SAP loss is based on an additional network that is pre-trained by means of mapping the centroid probability map and the pixel-to-boundary distance maps to a different nucleus representation. Extensive experiments justify the effectiveness of each component in the proposed CPP-Net. Finally, CPP-Net is found to achieve state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available databases, namely DSB2018, BBBC06, and PanNuke. Code of this paper will be released

Inisialisasi Otomatis Metode Level Set untuk Segmentasi Objek Overlapping pada Citra Panorama Gigi

Penelitian tentang segmentasi gigi individu telah banyak dilakukan dan memperoleh hasil yang baik. Namun, ketika dihadapkan kepada gigi overlap maka hal ini menjadi sebuah tantangan. Untuk memisahkan dua gigi overlap, maka perlu mengekstrak objek overlap terlebih dahulu. Metode level set banyak digunakan untuk melakukan segmentasi objek overlap, namun memiliki kelemahan yaitu perlu didefinisikan inisial awal metode level set secara manual oleh pengguna. Dalam penelitian ini diusulkan strategi inisialisasi otomatis pada metode level set untuk melakukan segmentasi gigi overlap menggunakan Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) pada citra panorama gigi. Tahapan strategi yang diusulkan terdiri dari preprocessing dimana di dalamnya ada proses perbaikan, rotasi dan cropping citra, dilanjutkan proses inisialisasi otomatis menggunakan algoritma HCA , dan yang terakhir segmentasi menggunakan metode level set. Hasil evaluasi menunjukkan bahwa strategi yang diusulkan berhasil melakukan inisialisasi secara otomatis dengan akurasi 73%. Hasil evaluasi segmentasi objek overlap cukup memuaskan dengan rasio misclassification error  0,93% dan relative foreground area error 24%. Dari hasil evaluasi menunjukkan bahwa strategi yang diusulkan dapat melakukan inisialisasi otomatis dengan baik. Inisialisasi yang tepat menghasilkan segmentasi yang baik pada metode level set.AbstractIndividual teeth segmentation has done a lot of the recent research and obtained good results. When faced with overlapping teeth, this is quite challenging. To separate overlapping teeth, it is necessary to extract the overlapping object first. The level set method is widely used to segment overlap objects, but it has a limitation that needs to define the initial level set method manually by the user. This research proposes an automatic initialization strategy for the level set method to segment overlapping teeth using Hierarchical Cluster Analysis on dental panoramic radiograph images. The proposed strategy stage consists of preprocessing where there are several processes of enhancement, rotation, and cropping of the image, Then the automatic initialization process uses the HCA algorithm and the last is segmentation using the level set method. The evaluation results show that the proposed strategy is successful in carrying out automatic initialization with an accuracy of 73%. The results of the overlap object segmentation evaluation are satisfactory with a misclassification error ratio of 0.93% and a relative foreground area error of 24%. The evaluation results show that the proposed strategy can carry out automated initialization well. Proper initialization results can perform good segmentation of the level set method

Image Enhancement and Segmentation Techniques for Detection of Knee Joint Diseases: A Survey

Knee bone diseases are rare but might be highly destructive. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the main approach to identify knee cancer and its treatment. Normally, the knee cancers are pointed out with the help of different MRI analysis techniques and latter image analysis strategies understand these images. Computer-based medical image analysis is getting researcher's interest due to its advantages of speed and accuracy as compared to traditional techniques. The focus of current research is MRI-based medical image analysis for knee bone disease detection. Accordingly, several approaches for features extraction and segmentation for knee bone cancer are analyzed and compared on benchmark database. Finally, the current state of the art is investigated and future directions are proposed