This study investigates a novel CT/MR spine image fusion algorithm based on graph cuts. This algorithm allows physicians to visually assess corresponding soft tissue and bony detail on a single image eliminating mental alignment and correlation needed when both CT and MR images are required for diagnosis. We state the problem as a discrete multilabel optimization of an energy functional that balances the contributions of three competing terms: (1) a squared error, which encourages the solution to be similar to the MR input, with a preference to strong MR edges; (2) a squared error, which encourages the solution to be similar to the CT input, with a preference to strong CT edges; and (3) a prior, which favors smooth solutions by encouraging neighboring pixels to have similar fused-image values. We further introduce a transparency-labeling formulation, which significantly reduces the computational load. The proposed graph-cut fusion guarantees nearly global solutions, while avoiding the pix elation artifacts that affect standard wavelet-based methods. We report several quantitative evaluations/comparisons over 40 pairs of CT/MR images acquired from 20 patients, which demonstrate a very competitive performance in comparisons to the existing methods. We further discuss various case studies, and give a representative sample of the results.
Computer-aided diagnosis systems (CADx) play a major role in the early diagnosis of breast cancer. Extracting the breast region precisely from a mammogram is an essential component of CADx for mammography. The appearance of the pectoral muscle on medio-lateral oblique (MLO) views increases the false positive rate in CADx. Therefore, the pectoral muscle should be identified and removed from the breast region in an MLO image before further analysis. None of the previous pectoral muscle segmentation methods address all breast types based on the breast imaging-reporting and data system tissue density classes. In this paper, we deal with this deficiency by introducing a new simple yet effective method that combines geometric rules with a region growing algorithm to support the segmentation of all types of pectoral muscles (normal, convex, concave, and combinatorial). Experimental segmentation accuracy results were reported for four tissue density classes on 872 MLO images from three publicly available datasets. An average Jaccard index and Dice similarity coefficient of 0.972 ± 0.003 and 0.985 ± 0.001 were obtained, respectively. The mean Hausdorff distance between the contours detected by our method and the ground truth is below 5 mm for all datasets. An average acceptable segmentation rate of ∼95% was achieved outperforming several state-of-the-art competing methods. Excellent results were obtained even for the most challenging class of extremely dense breasts.Computer-aided diagnosis systems (CADx) play a major role in the early diagnosis of breast cancer. Extracting the breast region precisely from a mammogram is an essential component of CADx for mammography. The appearance of the pectoral muscle on medio-lateral oblique (MLO) views increases the false positive rate in CADx. Therefore, the pectoral muscle should be identified and removed from the breast region in an MLO image before further analysis. None of the previous pectoral muscle segmentation methods address all breast types based on the breast imaging-reporting and data system tissue density classes. In this paper, we deal with this deficiency by introducing a new simple yet effective method that combines geometric rules with a region growing algorithm to support the segmentation of all types of pectoral muscles (normal, convex, concave, and combinatorial). Experimental segmentation accuracy results were reported for four tissue density classes on 872 MLO images from three publicly available datasets. An average Jaccard index and Dice similarity coefficient of 0.972 ± 0.003 and 0.985 ± 0.001 were obtained, respectively. The mean Hausdorff distance between the contours detected by our method and the ground truth is below 5 mm for all datasets. An average acceptable segmentation rate of ∼95% was achieved outperforming several state-of-the-art competing methods. Excellent results were obtained even for the most challenging class of extremely dense breasts.
In an attempt to improve the visualisation techniques for diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal injuries, we present a novel method for a pixel-wise fusion of CT and MR images. We focus on the spine and its related diseases including osteophyte growth, degenerate disc disease and spinal stenosis. This will have benefit to the 50-75% of people who suffer from back pain, which is the reason for 1.8% of all hospital stays in the United States.1 Pre-registered CT and MR image pairs were used. Rigid registration was performed based on soft tissue correspondence. A pixel-wise image fusion algorithm was designed to combine CT and MR images into a single image. This was accomplished by minimizing an energy functional using a graph cut approach. The functional was formulated to balance the similarity between the resultant image and the CT image as well as between the resultant image and the MR image. Furthermore the variational smoothness of the resultant image was considered in the energy functional (to enforce natural transitions between pixels). The results have been validated based on the amount of significant detail preserved in the final fused image. Based on bone cortex and disc / spinal cord areas, 95% of the relevant MR detail and 85% of the relevant CT detail was preserved. This work has the potential to aid in patient diagnosis, surgery planning and execution along with post operative follow up.
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