Automatic Nonlinear Filtering and Segmentation for Breast Ultrasound Images

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women worldwide. The proposed approach comprises three steps as follows. Firstly, the image is preprocessed to remove speckle noise while preserving important features of the image. Three methods are investigated, i.e., Frost Filter, Detail Preserving Anisotropic Diffusion, and Probabilistic Patch-Based Filter. Secondly, Normalized Cut or Quick Shift is used to provide an initial segmentation map for breast lesions. Thirdly, a postprocessing step is proposed to select the correct region from a set of candidate regions. This approach is implemented on a dataset containing 20 B-mode ultrasound images, acquired from UDIAT Diagnostic Center of Sabadell, Spain. The overall system performance is determined against the ground truth images. The best system performance is achieved through the following combinations: Frost Filter with Quick Shift, Detail Preserving Anisotropic Diffusion with Normalized Cut and Probabilistic Patch-Based with Normalized Cut

Bilevel Optimization with Nonsmooth Lower Level Problems

Abstract. We consider a bilevel optimization approach for parameter learning in nonsmooth variational models. Existing approaches solve this problem by applying implicit differentiation to a sufficiently smooth ap-proximation of the nondifferentiable lower level problem. We propose an alternative method based on differentiating the iterations of a nonlin-ear primal–dual algorithm. Our method computes exact (sub)gradients and can be applied also in the nonsmooth setting. We show preliminary results for the case of multi-label image segmentation.

Anaesthetic EEG signal denoise using improved nonlocal mean methods

This paper applies the nonlocal mean (NLM) method to denoise the simulated and real electroencephalograph signals. As a patch-based method, the NLM method calculates the weighted sum of a patch. The weight of each point is determined by the similarity between the points of the own patch and its neighbor. Based on the weighted sum, the noise is filtered out. In this study, the NLM denoising method is applied to signals with additive Gaussian white noise, spiking noise and specific frequency noise and the results are compared with that of the popular sym8 and db16 Wavelet threshold denoising (WTD) methods. The outcomes show that the NLM on average achieves 2.70 dB increase in improved signal to noise ratio (SNRimp) and 0.37 % drop in improved percentage distortion ratio compared with WTD. The moving adaptive shape patches-NLM performs better than the original NLM when the signals change dramatically. In addition, the performance of combined NLMWTD denoising method is also better than original WTD method (0.50–4.89 dB higher in SNRimp), especially, when the signal quality is poor