Body-wide anatomy recognition on CT images with pathology becomes crucial for quantifying body-wide disease burden. This, however, is a challenging problem because various diseases result in various abnormalities of objects such as shape and intensity patterns. We previously developed an automatic anatomy recognition (AAR) system [1] whose applicability was demonstrated on near normal diagnostic CT images in different body regions on 35 organs. The aim of this paper is to investigate strategies for adapting the previous AAR system to diagnostic CT images of patients with various pathologies as a first step toward automated body-wide disease quantification. The AAR approach consists of three main steps – model building, object recognition, and object delineation. In this paper, within the broader AAR framework, we describe a new strategy for object recognition to handle abnormal images. In the model building stage an optimal threshold interval is learned from near-normal training images for each object. This threshold is optimally tuned to the pathological manifestation of the object in the test image. Recognition is performed following a hierarchical representation of the objects. Experimental results for the abdominal body region based on 50 near-normal images used for model building and 20 abnormal images used for object recognition show that object localization accuracy within 2 voxels for liver and spleen and 3 voxels for kidney can be achieved with the new strategy.
Lesion segmentation has remained a challenge in different body regions. Generalizability is lacking in published methods as variability in results is common, even for a given organ and modality, such that it becomes difficult to establish standardized methods of disease quantification and reporting. This paper makes an attempt at a generalizable method based on classifying lesions along with their background into groups using clinically used visual attributes. Using an Iterative Relative Fuzzy Connectedness (IRFC) delineation engine, the ideas are implemented for the task of liver lesion segmentation in computed tomography (CT) images. For lesion groups with the same background properties, a few subjects are chosen as the training set to obtain the optimal IRFC parameters for the background tissue components. For lesion groups with similar foreground properties, optimal foreground parameters for IRFC are set as the median intensity value of the training lesion subset. To segment liver lesions belonging to a certain group, the devised method requires manual loading of the corresponding parameters, and correct setting of the foreground and background seeds. The segmentation is then completed in seconds. Segmentation accuracy and repeatability with respect to seed specification are evaluated. Accuracy is assessed by the assignment of a delineation quality score (DQS) to each case. Inter-operator repeatability is assessed by the difference between segmentations carried out independently by two operators. Experiments on 80 liver lesion cases show that the proposed method achieves a mean DQS score of 4.03 and inter-operator repeatability of 92.3%.
We present a straightforward brightness preserving image enhancement technique. The proposed method is based on an original gradient and intensity histogram (GIH) which contains both gradient and intensity information of the image. This character enables GIH to avoid high peaks in the traditional intensity histogram and, thus alleviate overenhancement in our enhancement method, i.e., gradient and intensity histogram equalization (GIHE). GIHE can also enhance the gradient strength of an image, which is good for improving the subjective quality since the human vision system is more sensitive to the gradient than the absolute intensity of image. Considering that brightness preservation and dynamic range compression are highly demanded in consumer electronics, we manipulate the intensity of the enhanced image appropriately by amplifying the small intensities and attenuating the large intensities, respectively, using a brightness preserving function (BPF). The BPF is straightforward and universal and can be used in other image enhancement techniques. We demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the subjective quality as well as preserve the brightness of the input image.
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