1,293 research outputs found
Probabilistic modeling of texture transition for fast tracking and delineation
In this thesis a probabilistic approach to texture boundary detection for tracking applications is presented. We have developed a novel fast algorithm for Bayesian estimation of texture transition locations from a short sequence of pixels on a scanline that combines the desirable speed of edge-based line search and the sophistication of Bayesian texture analysis given a small set of observations. For the cases where the given observations are too few for reliable Bayesian estimation of probability of texture change we propose an innovative machine learning technique to generate a probabilistic texture transition model. This is achieved by considering a training dataset containing small patches of blending textures. By encompassing in the training set enough examples to accurately model texture transitions of interest we can construct a predictor that can be used for object boundary tracking that can deal with few observations and demanding cases of tracking of arbitrary textured objects against cluttered background. Object outlines are then obtained by combining the texture crossing probabilities across a set of scanlines. We show that a rigid geometric model of the object to be tracked or smoothness constraints in the absence of such a model can be used to coalesce the scanline texture crossing probabilities obtained using the methods mentioned above. We propose a Hidden Markov Model to aggregate robustly the sparse transition probabilities of scanlines sampled along the projected hypothesis model contour. As a result continuous object contours can be extracted using a posteriori maximization of texture transition probabilities. On the other hand, stronger geometric constraints such as available rigid models of the target are directly enforced by robust stochastic optimization. In addition to being fast, the allure of the proposed probabilistic framework is that it accommodates a unique infrastructure for tracking of heterogeneous objects which utilizes the machine learning-based predictor as well as the Bayesian estimator interchangeably in conjunction with robust optimization to extract object contours robustly. We apply the developed methods to tracking of textured and non textured rigid objects as well as deformable body outlines and monocular articulated human motion in challenging conditions. Finally, because it is fast, our method can also serve as an interactive texture segmentation tool
Combinatorial optimisation for arterial image segmentation.
Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of the mortality in the western world. Many imaging modalities have been used to diagnose cardiovascular diseases. However, each has different forms of noise and artifacts that make the medical image analysis field important and challenging. This thesis is concerned with developing fully automatic segmentation methods for cross-sectional coronary arterial imaging in particular, intra-vascular ultrasound and optical coherence tomography, by incorporating prior and tracking information without any user intervention, to effectively overcome various image artifacts and occlusions. Combinatorial optimisation methods are proposed to solve the segmentation problem in polynomial time. A node-weighted directed graph is constructed so that the vessel border delineation is considered as computing a minimum closed set. A set of complementary edge and texture features is extracted. Single and double interface segmentation methods are introduced. Novel optimisation of the boundary energy function is proposed based on a supervised classification method. Shape prior model is incorporated into the segmentation framework based on global and local information through the energy function design and graph construction. A combination of cross-sectional segmentation and longitudinal tracking is proposed using the Kalman filter and the hidden Markov model. The border is parameterised using the radial basis functions. The Kalman filter is used to adapt the inter-frame constraints between every two consecutive frames to obtain coherent temporal segmentation. An HMM-based border tracking method is also proposed in which the emission probability is derived from both the classification-based cost function and the shape prior model. The optimal sequence of the hidden states is computed using the Viterbi algorithm. Both qualitative and quantitative results on thousands of images show superior performance of the proposed methods compared to a number of state-of-the-art segmentation methods
Computational methods for the analysis of functional 4D-CT chest images.
Medical imaging is an important emerging technology that has been intensively used in the last few decades for disease diagnosis and monitoring as well as for the assessment of treatment effectiveness. Medical images provide a very large amount of valuable information that is too huge to be exploited by radiologists and physicians. Therefore, the design of computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system, which can be used as an assistive tool for the medical community, is of a great importance. This dissertation deals with the development of a complete CAD system for lung cancer patients, which remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in the USA. In 2014, there were approximately 224,210 new cases of lung cancer and 159,260 related deaths. The process begins with the detection of lung cancer which is detected through the diagnosis of lung nodules (a manifestation of lung cancer). These nodules are approximately spherical regions of primarily high density tissue that are visible in computed tomography (CT) images of the lung. The treatment of these lung cancer nodules is complex, nearly 70% of lung cancer patients require radiation therapy as part of their treatment. Radiation-induced lung injury is a limiting toxicity that may decrease cure rates and increase morbidity and mortality treatment. By finding ways to accurately detect, at early stage, and hence prevent lung injury, it will have significant positive consequences for lung cancer patients. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to develop a clinically usable CAD system that can improve the sensitivity and specificity of early detection of radiation-induced lung injury based on the hypotheses that radiated lung tissues may get affected and suffer decrease of their functionality as a side effect of radiation therapy treatment. These hypotheses have been validated by demonstrating that automatic segmentation of the lung regions and registration of consecutive respiratory phases to estimate their elasticity, ventilation, and texture features to provide discriminatory descriptors that can be used for early detection of radiation-induced lung injury. The proposed methodologies will lead to novel indexes for distinguishing normal/healthy and injured lung tissues in clinical decision-making. To achieve this goal, a CAD system for accurate detection of radiation-induced lung injury that requires three basic components has been developed. These components are the lung fields segmentation, lung registration, and features extraction and tissue classification. This dissertation starts with an exploration of the available medical imaging modalities to present the importance of medical imaging in todayâs clinical applications. Secondly, the methodologies, challenges, and limitations of recent CAD systems for lung cancer detection are covered. This is followed by introducing an accurate segmentation methodology of the lung parenchyma with the focus of pathological lungs to extract the volume of interest (VOI) to be analyzed for potential existence of lung injuries stemmed from the radiation therapy. After the segmentation of the VOI, a lung registration framework is introduced to perform a crucial and important step that ensures the co-alignment of the intra-patient scans. This step eliminates the effects of orientation differences, motion, breathing, heart beats, and differences in scanning parameters to be able to accurately extract the functionality features for the lung fields. The developed registration framework also helps in the evaluation and gated control of the radiotherapy through the motion estimation analysis before and after the therapy dose. Finally, the radiation-induced lung injury is introduced, which combines the previous two medical image processing and analysis steps with the features estimation and classification step. This framework estimates and combines both texture and functional features. The texture features are modeled using the novel 7th-order Markov Gibbs random field (MGRF) model that has the ability to accurately models the texture of healthy and injured lung tissues through simultaneously accounting for both vertical and horizontal relative dependencies between voxel-wise signals. While the functionality features calculations are based on the calculated deformation fields, obtained from the 4D-CT lung registration, that maps lung voxels between successive CT scans in the respiratory cycle. These functionality features describe the ventilation, the air flow rate, of the lung tissues using the Jacobian of the deformation field and the tissuesâ elasticity using the strain components calculated from the gradient of the deformation field. Finally, these features are combined in the classification model to detect the injured parts of the lung at an early stage and enables an earlier intervention
River Response to Sediment Supply: The Sand Bed Case
Effective management of in-channel and floodplain habitat requires an ability to forecast river response to changes in water and sediment supply. These changes may result from dam construction/decommissioning, changes in reservoir operations, or changes in grazing or forestry practices. If a change in water and sediment supply causes sediment to be delivered faster than the channelâs capacity to transport it, sediment will accumulate in the reach, leading to changes in channel form and increasing the potential for flooding. A decrease in sediment supply relative to transport capacity can lead to channel incision. The extent and timing of sediment accumulation or evacuation can be moderated, even reversed, by poorly understood changes in the river bed grain size. This dissertation explores the joint response of river bed texture and sediment storage in order to better predict the magnitude of channel change in response to upstream changes in infrastructure or land use in sand bed rivers. We use a combination of field measurements of sediment transport, analysis of channel change from repeat aerial images, and numerical modeling to explore the interaction among sediment supply rate and grain size with bed grain size and morphologic adjustment. We find that sand sizes are sorted throughout the alluvial channel and floodplain such that the in-channel response may be different than floodplain adjustments. At our field site, certain sand sizes evacuate as the bed coarsened while other sand sizes accumulated in the floodplains. These findings indicate that conditions of sediment accumulation or evacuation cannot reveal important changes in the river and size fractional sediment budgets are needed to evaluate channel change. Our numerical modeling indicates that the supply grain size has a strong effect on the grain size of sand on the bed, making the river more or less effective at transporting sediment. Under conditions when the sediment supply increases, such as after wildfires, dam removals, or changes in land use or forestry practices, small changes in the grain size of sand on the channel bed can cause sediment to accumulate, evacuate, or there may be no morphologic adjustment depending on the length of the disturbance and how the supply grain size changes. This has important implications for forecasting downstream impacts. Management concerns may be delayed or even eliminated depending on the bed grain size response. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering the supply grain size and behavior and destination of the fractional sizes in transport when predicting a sand-bed river response to a watershed disturbance
Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition
The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE
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Multidimensional image analysis of cardiac function in MRI
Cardiac morphology is a key indicator of cardiac health. Important metrics that are currently in clinical use are left-ventricle cardiac ejection fraction, cardiac muscle (myocardium) mass, myocardium thickness and myocardium thickening over the cardiac cycle. Advances in imaging technologies have led to an increase in temporal and spatial resolution. Such an increase in data presents a laborious task for medical practitioners to analyse.
In this thesis, measurement of the cardiac left-ventricle function is achieved by developing novel methods for the automatic segmentation of the left-ventricle blood-pool and the left ventricle myocardium boundaries. A preliminary challenge faced in this task is the removal of noise from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data, which is addressed by using advanced data filtering procedures. Two mechanisms for left-ventricle segmentation are employed.
Firstly segmentation of the left ventricle blood-pool for the measurement of ejection fraction is undertaken in the signal intensity domain. Utilising the high discrimination between blood and tissue, a novel methodology based on a statistical partitioning method offers success in localising and segmenting the blood pool of the left ventricle. From this initialisation, the estimation of the outer wall (epi-cardium) of the left ventricle can be achieved using gradient information and prior knowledge.
Secondly, a more involved method for extracting the myocardium of the leftventricle is developed, that can better perform segmentation in higher dimensions. Spatial information is incorporated in the segmentation by employing a gradient-based boundary evolution. A level-set scheme is implemented and a novel formulation for the extraction of the cardiac muscle is introduced. Two surfaces, representing the inner and the outer boundaries of the left-ventricle, are simultaneously evolved using a coupling function and supervised with a probabilistic model of expertly assisted manual segmentations
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