Vessel tractography using an intensity based tensor model with branch detection

In this paper, we present a tubular structure seg- mentation method that utilizes a second order tensor constructed from directional intensity measurements, which is inspired from diffusion tensor image (DTI) modeling. The constructed anisotropic tensor which is fit inside a vessel drives the segmen- tation analogously to a tractography approach in DTI. Our model is initialized at a single seed point and is capable of capturing whole vessel trees by an automatic branch detection algorithm developed in the same framework. The centerline of the vessel as well as its thickness is extracted. Performance results within the Rotterdam Coronary Artery Algorithm Evaluation framework are provided for comparison with existing techniques. 96.4% average overlap with ground truth delineated by experts is obtained in addition to other measures reported in the paper. Moreover, we demonstrate further quantitative results over synthetic vascular datasets, and we provide quantitative experiments for branch detection on patient Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) volumes, as well as qualitative evaluations on the same CTA datasets, from visual scores by a cardiologist expert

Assessing hyper parameter optimization and speedup for convolutional neural networks

The increased processing power of graphical processing units (GPUs) and the availability of large image datasets has fostered a renewed interest in extracting semantic information from images. Promising results for complex image categorization problems have been achieved using deep learning, with neural networks comprised of many layers. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are one such architecture which provides more opportunities for image classification. Advances in CNN enable the development of training models using large labelled image datasets, but the hyper parameters need to be specified, which is challenging and complex due to the large number of parameters. A substantial amount of computational power and processing time is required to determine the optimal hyper parameters to define a model yielding good results. This article provides a survey of the hyper parameter search and optimization methods for CNN architectures

A survey on utilization of data mining approaches for dermatological (skin) diseases prediction

Due to recent technology advances, large volumes of medical data is obtained. These data contain valuable information. Therefore data mining techniques can be used to extract useful patterns. This paper is intended to introduce data mining and its various techniques and a survey of the available literature on medical data mining. We emphasize mainly on the application of data mining on skin diseases. A categorization has been provided based on the different data mining techniques. The utility of the various data mining methodologies is highlighted. Generally association mining is suitable for extracting rules. It has been used especially in cancer diagnosis. Classification is a robust method in medical mining. In this paper, we have summarized the different uses of classification in dermatology. It is one of the most important methods for diagnosis of erythemato-squamous diseases. There are different methods like Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and fuzzy classifiaction in this topic. Clustering is a useful method in medical images mining. The purpose of clustering techniques is to find a structure for the given data by finding similarities between data according to data characteristics. Clustering has some applications in dermatology. Besides introducing different mining methods, we have investigated some challenges which exist in mining skin data

Automatic Segmentation of Cells of Different Types in Fluorescence Microscopy Images

Recognition of different cell compartments, types of cells, and their interactions is a critical aspect of quantitative cell biology. This provides a valuable insight for understanding cellular and subcellular interactions and mechanisms of biological processes, such as cancer cell dissemination, organ development and wound healing. Quantitative analysis of cell images is also the mainstay of numerous clinical diagnostic and grading procedures, for example in cancer, immunological, infectious, heart and lung disease. Computer automation of cellular biological samples quantification requires segmenting different cellular and sub-cellular structures in microscopy images. However, automating this problem has proven to be non-trivial, and requires solving multi-class image segmentation tasks that are challenging owing to the high similarity of objects from different classes and irregularly shaped structures. This thesis focuses on the development and application of probabilistic graphical models to multi-class cell segmentation. Graphical models can improve the segmentation accuracy by their ability to exploit prior knowledge and model inter-class dependencies. Directed acyclic graphs, such as trees have been widely used to model top-down statistical dependencies as a prior for improved image segmentation. However, using trees, a few inter-class constraints can be captured. To overcome this limitation, polytree graphical models are proposed in this thesis that capture label proximity relations more naturally compared to tree-based approaches. Polytrees can effectively impose the prior knowledge on the inclusion of different classes by capturing both same-level and across-level dependencies. A novel recursive mechanism based on two-pass message passing is developed to efficiently calculate closed form posteriors of graph nodes on polytrees. Furthermore, since an accurate and sufficiently large ground truth is not always available for training segmentation algorithms, a weakly supervised framework is developed to employ polytrees for multi-class segmentation that reduces the need for training with the aid of modeling the prior knowledge during segmentation. Generating a hierarchical graph for the superpixels in the image, labels of nodes are inferred through a novel efficient message-passing algorithm and the model parameters are optimized with Expectation Maximization (EM). Results of evaluation on the segmentation of simulated data and multiple publicly available fluorescence microscopy datasets indicate the outperformance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art. The proposed method has also been assessed in predicting the possible segmentation error and has been shown to outperform trees. This can pave the way to calculate uncertainty measures on the resulting segmentation and guide subsequent segmentation refinement, which can be useful in the development of an interactive segmentation framework