Segmentation of skin lesions in 2D and 3D ultrasound images using a spatially coherent generalized Rayleigh mixture model

This paper addresses the problem of jointly estimating the statistical distribution and segmenting lesions in multiple-tissue high-frequency skin ultrasound images. The distribution of multiple-tissue images is modeled as a spatially coherent finite mixture of heavy-tailed Rayleigh distributions. Spatial coherence inherent to biological tissues is modeled by enforcing local dependence between the mixture components. An original Bayesian algorithm combined with a Markov chain Monte Carlo method is then proposed to jointly estimate the mixture parameters and a label-vector associating each voxel to a tissue. More precisely, a hybrid Metropolis-within-Gibbs sampler is used to draw samples that are asymptotically distributed according to the posterior distribution of the Bayesian model. The Bayesian estimators of the model parameters are then computed from the generated samples. Simulation results are conducted on synthetic data to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimation strategy. The method is then successfully applied to the segmentation of in vivo skin tumors in high-frequency 2-D and 3-D ultrasound images

Echocardiography

The book "Echocardiography - New Techniques" brings worldwide contributions from highly acclaimed clinical and imaging science investigators, and representatives from academic medical centers. Each chapter is designed and written to be accessible to those with a basic knowledge of echocardiography. Additionally, the chapters are meant to be stimulating and educational to the experts and investigators in the field of echocardiography. This book is aimed primarily at cardiology fellows on their basic echocardiography rotation, fellows in general internal medicine, radiology and emergency medicine, and experts in the arena of echocardiography. Over the last few decades, the rate of technological advancements has developed dramatically, resulting in new techniques and improved echocardiographic imaging. The authors of this book focused on presenting the most advanced techniques useful in today's research and in daily clinical practice. These advanced techniques are utilized in the detection of different cardiac pathologies in patients, in contributing to their clinical decision, as well as follow-up and outcome predictions. In addition to the advanced techniques covered, this book expounds upon several special pathologies with respect to the functions of echocardiography

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationCongenital heart defects are classes of birth defects that affect the structure and function of the heart. These defects are attributed to the abnormal or incomplete development of a fetal heart during the first few weeks following conception. The overall detection rate of congenital heart defects during routine prenatal examination is low. This is attributed to the insufficient number of trained personnel in many local health centers where many cases of congenital heart defects go undetected. This dissertation presents a system to identify congenital heart defects to improve pregnancy outcomes and increase their detection rates. The system was developed and its performance assessed in identifying the presence of ventricular defects (congenital heart defects that affect the size of the ventricles) using four-dimensional fetal chocardiographic images. The designed system consists of three components: 1) a fetal heart location estimation component, 2) a fetal heart chamber segmentation component, and 3) a detection component that detects congenital heart defects from the segmented chambers. The location estimation component is used to isolate a fetal heart in any four-dimensional fetal echocardiographic image. It uses a hybrid region of interest extraction method that is robust to speckle noise degradation inherent in all ultrasound images. The location estimation method's performance was analyzed on 130 four-dimensional fetal echocardiographic images by comparison with manually identified fetal heart region of interest. The location estimation method showed good agreement with the manually identified standard using four quantitative indexes: Jaccard index, Sørenson-Dice index, Sensitivity index and Specificity index. The average values of these indexes were measured at 80.70%, 89.19%, 91.04%, and 99.17%, respectively. The fetal heart chamber segmentation component uses velocity vector field estimates computed on frames contained in a four-dimensional image to identify the fetal heart chambers. The velocity vector fields are computed using a histogram-based optical flow technique which is formulated on local image characteristics to reduces the effect of speckle noise and nonuniform echogenicity on the velocity vector field estimates. Features based on the velocity vector field estimates, voxel brightness/intensity values, and voxel Cartesian coordinate positions were extracted and used with kernel k-means algorithm to identify the individual chambers. The segmentation method's performance was evaluated on 130 images from 31 patients by comparing the segmentation results with manually identified fetal heart chambers. Evaluation was based on the Sørenson-Dice index, the absolute volume difference and the Hausdorff distance, with each resulting in per patient average values of 69.92%, 22.08%, and 2.82 mm, respectively. The detection component uses the volumes of the identified fetal heart chambers to flag the possible occurrence of hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a type of congenital heart defect. An empirical volume threshold defined on the relative ratio of adjacent fetal heart chamber volumes obtained manually is used in the detection process. The performance of the detection procedure was assessed by comparison with a set of images with confirmed diagnosis of hypoplastic left heart syndrome and a control group of normal fetal hearts. Of the 130 images considered 18 of 20 (90%) fetal hearts were correctly detected as having hypoplastic left heart syndrome and 84 of 110 (76.36%) fetal hearts were correctly detected as normal in the control group. The results show that the detection system performs better than the overall detection rate for congenital heart defect which is reported to be between 30% and 60%

Statistical modeling and processing of high frequency ultrasound images: application to dermatologic oncology

Cette thèse étudie le traitement statistique des images d’ultrasons de haute fréquence, avec application à l’exploration in-vivo de la peau humaine et l’évaluation non invasive de lésions. Des méthodes Bayésiennes sont considérées pour la segmentation d’images échographiques de la peau. On y établit que les ultrasons rétrodiffusés par la peau convergent vers un processus aléatoire complexe de type Levy-Flight, avec des statistiques non Gaussiennes alpha-stables. L’enveloppe du signal suit une distribution Rayleigh généralisée à queue lourde. A partir de ces résultats, il est proposé de modéliser l’image ultrason de multiples tissus comme un mélange spatialement cohérent de lois Rayleigh à queues lourdes. La cohérence spatiale inhérente aux tissus biologiques est modélisée par un champ aléatoire de Potts-Markov pour représenter la dépendance locale entre les composantes du mélange. Un algorithme Bayésien original combiné à une méthode Monte Carlo par chaine de Markov (MCMC) est proposé pour conjointement estimer les paramètres du modèle et classifier chaque voxel dans un tissu. L’approche proposée est appliquée avec succès à la segmentation de tumeurs de la peau in-vivo dans des images d’ultrasons de haute fréquence en 2D et 3D. Cette méthode est ensuite étendue en incluant l’estimation du paramètre B de régularisation du champ de Potts dans la chaine MCMC. Les méthodes MCMC classiques ne sont pas directement applicables à ce problème car la vraisemblance du champ de Potts ne peut pas être évaluée. Ce problème difficile est traité en adoptant un algorithme Metropolis-Hastings “sans vraisemblance” fondé sur la statistique suffisante du Potts. La méthode de segmentation non supervisée, ainsi développée, est appliquée avec succès à des images échographiques 3D. Finalement, le problème du calcul de la borne de Cramer-Rao (CRB) du paramètre B est étudié. Cette borne dépend des dérivées de la constante de normalisation du modèle de Potts, dont le calcul est infaisable. Ce problème est résolu en proposant un algorithme Monte Carlo original, qui est appliqué avec succès au calcul de la borne CRB des modèles d’Ising et de Potts. ABSTRACT : This thesis studies statistical image processing of high frequency ultrasound imaging, with application to in-vivo exploration of human skin and noninvasive lesion assessment. More precisely, Bayesian methods are considered in order to perform tissue segmentation in ultrasound images of skin. It is established that ultrasound signals backscattered from skin tissues converge to a complex Levy Flight random process with non-Gaussian _-stable statistics. The envelope signal follows a generalized (heavy-tailed) Rayleigh distribution. Based on these results, it is proposed to model the distribution of multiple-tissue ultrasound images as a spatially coherent finite mixture of heavy-tailed Rayleigh distributions. Spatial coherence inherent to biological tissues is modeled by a Potts Markov random field. An original Bayesian algorithm combined with a Markov chain Monte Carlo method is then proposed to jointly estimate the mixture parameters and a label-vector associating each voxel to a tissue. The proposed method is successfully applied to the segmentation of in-vivo skin tumors in high frequency 2D and 3D ultrasound images. This method is subsequently extended by including the estimation of the Potts regularization parameter B within the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Standard MCMC methods cannot be applied to this problem because the likelihood of B is intractable. This difficulty is addressed by using a likelihood-free Metropolis-Hastings algorithm based on the sufficient statistic of the Potts model. The resulting unsupervised segmentation method is successfully applied to tridimensional ultrasound images. Finally, the problem of computing the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of B is studied. The CRB depends on the derivatives of the intractable normalizing constant of the Potts model. This is resolved by proposing an original Monte Carlo algorithm, which is successfully applied to compute the CRB of the Ising and Potts models

Inverse problems in medical ultrasound images - applications to image deconvolution, segmentation and super-resolution

In the field of medical image analysis, ultrasound is a core imaging modality employed due to its real time and easy-to-use nature, its non-ionizing and low cost characteristics. Ultrasound imaging is used in numerous clinical applications, such as fetus monitoring, diagnosis of cardiac diseases, flow estimation, etc. Classical applications in ultrasound imaging involve tissue characterization, tissue motion estimation or image quality enhancement (contrast, resolution, signal to noise ratio). However, one of the major problems with ultrasound images, is the presence of noise, having the form of a granular pattern, called speckle. The speckle noise in ultrasound images leads to the relative poor image qualities compared with other medical image modalities, which limits the applications of medical ultrasound imaging. In order to better understand and analyze ultrasound images, several device-based techniques have been developed during last 20 years. The object of this PhD thesis is to propose new image processing methods allowing us to improve ultrasound image quality using postprocessing techniques. First, we propose a Bayesian method for joint deconvolution and segmentation of ultrasound images based on their tight relationship. The problem is formulated as an inverse problem that is solved within a Bayesian framework. Due to the intractability of the posterior distribution associated with the proposed Bayesian model, we investigate a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique which generates samples distributed according to the posterior and use these samples to build estimators of the ultrasound image. In a second step, we propose a fast single image super-resolution framework using a new analytical solution to the l2-l2 problems (i.e., $\ell_2$-norm regularized quadratic problems), which is applicable for both medical ultrasound images and piecewise/ natural images. In a third step, blind deconvolution of ultrasound images is studied by considering the following two strategies: i) A Gaussian prior for the PSF is proposed in a Bayesian framework. ii) An alternating optimization method is explored for blind deconvolution of ultrasound