1,137 research outputs found
Deep Learning of Unified Region, Edge, and Contour Models for Automated Image Segmentation
Image segmentation is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer
vision with applications spanning multiple areas, such as medical imaging,
remote sensing, and autonomous vehicles. Recently, convolutional neural
networks (CNNs) have gained traction in the design of automated segmentation
pipelines. Although CNN-based models are adept at learning abstract features
from raw image data, their performance is dependent on the availability and
size of suitable training datasets. Additionally, these models are often unable
to capture the details of object boundaries and generalize poorly to unseen
classes. In this thesis, we devise novel methodologies that address these
issues and establish robust representation learning frameworks for
fully-automatic semantic segmentation in medical imaging and mainstream
computer vision. In particular, our contributions include (1) state-of-the-art
2D and 3D image segmentation networks for computer vision and medical image
analysis, (2) an end-to-end trainable image segmentation framework that unifies
CNNs and active contour models with learnable parameters for fast and robust
object delineation, (3) a novel approach for disentangling edge and texture
processing in segmentation networks, and (4) a novel few-shot learning model in
both supervised settings and semi-supervised settings where synergies between
latent and image spaces are leveraged to learn to segment images given limited
training data.Comment: PhD dissertation, UCLA, 202
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 CefalĂą
• 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
Task Decomposition and Synchronization for Semantic Biomedical Image Segmentation
Semantic segmentation is essentially important to biomedical image analysis.
Many recent works mainly focus on integrating the Fully Convolutional Network
(FCN) architecture with sophisticated convolution implementation and deep
supervision. In this paper, we propose to decompose the single segmentation
task into three subsequent sub-tasks, including (1) pixel-wise image
segmentation, (2) prediction of the class labels of the objects within the
image, and (3) classification of the scene the image belonging to. While these
three sub-tasks are trained to optimize their individual loss functions of
different perceptual levels, we propose to let them interact by the task-task
context ensemble. Moreover, we propose a novel sync-regularization to penalize
the deviation between the outputs of the pixel-wise segmentation and the class
prediction tasks. These effective regularizations help FCN utilize context
information comprehensively and attain accurate semantic segmentation, even
though the number of the images for training may be limited in many biomedical
applications. We have successfully applied our framework to three diverse 2D/3D
medical image datasets, including Robotic Scene Segmentation Challenge 18
(ROBOT18), Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge 18 (BRATS18), and Retinal Fundus
Glaucoma Challenge (REFUGE18). We have achieved top-tier performance in all
three challenges.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imagin
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