Segmentation of abdomen MR images using kernel graph cuts with shape priors.

Background: Abdominal organs segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images is an important but challenging task in medical image processing. Especially for abdominal tissues or organs, such as liver and kidney, MR imaging is a very difficult task due to the fact that MR images are affected by inten...

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Published in:BioMedical Engineering OnLine Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 124 - 125
Main Authors: Luo, Qing, Qin, Wenjian, Wen, Tiexiang, Gu, Jia, Gaio, Nikolas, Chen, Shifu, Li, Ling, Xie, Yaoqin
Format: research Journal Article
Published: BioMed Central 2013
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      jtl: BioMedical Engineering OnLine
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      dt: 2013
      vid: 12
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      pub: BioMed Central
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        103935357
        103935357
        NLM24295198
        2012563846
        10.1186/1475-925X-12-124
        NLM24295198
        103935357
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        atl: Segmentation of abdomen MR images using kernel graph cuts with shape priors.
      aug:
        au:
          Luo, Qing
          Qin, Wenjian
          Wen, Tiexiang
          Gu, Jia
          Gaio, Nikolas
          Chen, Shifu
          Li, Ling
          Xie, Yaoqin
        affil: The Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Low-cost Healthcare, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, P, R, China. jia.gu@siat.ac.cn.
      sug:
        subj:
          Abdomen
          Image Processing, Computer Assisted Methods
          Magnetic Resonance Imaging Methods
          Algorithms
          Factor Analysis
          Reproducibility of Results
      ab: Background: Abdominal organs segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images is an important but challenging task in medical image processing. Especially for abdominal tissues or organs, such as liver and kidney, MR imaging is a very difficult task due to the fact that MR images are affected by intensity inhomogeneity, weak boundary, noise and the presence of similar objects close to each other.Method: In this study, a novel method for tissue or organ segmentation in abdomen MR imaging is proposed; this method combines kernel graph cuts (KGC) with shape priors. First, the region growing algorithm and morphology operations are used to obtain the initial contour. Second, shape priors are obtained by training the shape templates, which were collected from different human subjects with kernel principle component analysis (KPCA) after the registration between all the shape templates and the initial contour. Finally, a new model is constructed by integrating the shape priors into the kernel graph cuts energy function. The entire process aims to obtain an accurate image segmentation.Results: The proposed segmentation method has been applied to abdominal organs MR images. The results showed that a satisfying segmentation without boundary leakage and segmentation incorrect can be obtained also in presence of similar tissues. Quantitative experiments were conducted for comparing the proposed segmentation with other three methods: DRLSE, initial erosion contour and KGC without shape priors. The comparison is based on two quantitative performance measurements: the probabilistic rand index (PRI) and the variation of information (VoI). The proposed method has the highest PRI value (0.9912, 0.9983 and 0.9980 for liver, right kidney and left kidney respectively) and the lowest VoI values (1.6193, 0.3205 and 0.3217 for liver, right kidney and left kidney respectively).Conclusion: The proposed method can overcome boundary leakage. Moreover it can segment liver and kidneys in abdominal MR images without segmentation errors due to the presence of similar tissues. The shape priors based on KPCA was integrated into fully automatic graph cuts algorithm (KGC) to make the segmentation algorithm become more robust and accurate. Furthermore, if a shelter is placed onto the target boundary, the proposed method can still obtain satisfying segmentation results.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        research
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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