Cell counting and tracking approaches are widely used in microscopy image processing. Cells may be of different shapes and may be very crowded or relatively close together. In both cases, the correct identification of each cell requires the detection and tracking of its contour. But, this is not always possible due to noise, image blurring from signal degradation during the acquisition process and staining problems. Generally, cell segmentation approaches use filtering techniques, Hough transform, combined with morphological operators to address this problem. However, usually, not all contours can be closed. Therefore, heuristic contour closing techniques have been employed to achieve better results. Despite being necessary, no comparative studies on this type of methods were found in the literature. For that reason, this paper compares three approaches to contour tracking and closing. Two of them use one end of a contour as a starting point and trace a path along the edge of the cell seeking to find another endpoint of the cell. This is done using the first or second ring of neighboring pixels around the starting point. The heuristics used are based on region growing taking the information from the first or second ring of neighboring pixels and keeping the direction along the plotted path. The third method employs a modification of Dijkstra's algorithm. This approach employs two seed points located at each possible end of the contour. This paper presents a description of these techniques and evaluates the results in microscopy images.
Advances in medical imaging have fostered medical diagnosis based on digital images. Consequently, the number of studies by medical images diagnosis increases, thus, collaborative work and tele-radiology systems are required to effectively scale up to this diagnosis trend. We tackle the problem of the collaborative access of medical images, and present WebMedSA, a framework to manage large datasets of medical images. WebMedSA relies on a PACS and supports the ontological annotation, as well as segmentation and visualization of the images based on their semantic description. Ontological annotations can be performed directly on the volumetric image or at different image planes (e.g., axial, coronal, or sagittal); furthermore, annotations can be complemented after applying a segmentation technique. WebMedSA is based on three main steps: (1) RDF-ization process for extracting, anonymizing, and serializing metadata comprised in DICOM medical images into RDF/XML; (2) Integration of different biomedical ontologies (using L-MOM library), making this approach ontology independent; and (3) segmentation and visualization of annotated data which is further used to generate new annotations according to expert knowledge, and validation. Initial user evaluations suggest that WebMedSA facilitates the exchange of knowledge between radiologists, and provides the basis for collaborative work among them.
Grid computing has been successfully applied on teleradiology, leading to the creation of important platforms such as MEDICUS, VirtualPACS and mantisGRID, among others. These platforms are studied on the basis of their available documentation in order to compare and discuss differences and similarities, advantages and disadvantages between them. Then, a grid platform architecture is proposed, based on the best features of the surveyed platforms with an additional emphasis on general federated queries involving CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval) and Semantic Annotations.
The comparison of several Level Set algorithms is performed with respect to 2D left ventricle segmentation in Multi-Slice CT images. Five algorithms are compared by calculating the Dice coefficient between the resulting segmentation contour and a reference contour traced by a cardiologist. The algorithms are also tested on images contaminated with Gaussian noise for several values of PSNR. Additionally an algorithm for providing the initialization shape is proposed. This algorithm is based on a combination of mathematical morphology tools with watershed and region growing algorithms. Results on the set of test images are promising and suggest the extension to 3{D MSCT database segmentation.
KEYWORDS: Visualization, Image segmentation, Medical imaging, Tissues, Opacity, Volume rendering, Digital video recorders, Image processing, Image visualization, Health informatics
SemVisM is a toolbox that combines medical informatics and computer graphics tools for reducing the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts/terms in the images. This paper presents a novel strategy for visualizing medical data annotated semantically, combining rendering techniques, and segmentation algorithms. SemVisM comprises two main components: i) AMORE (A Modest vOlume REgister) to handle input data (RAW, DAT or DICOM) and to initially annotate the images using terms defined on medical ontologies (e.g., MesH, FMA or RadLex), and ii) VOLPROB (VOlume PRObability Builder) for generating the annotated volumetric data containing the classified voxels that belong to a particular tissue. SemVisM is built on top of the semantic visualizer ANISE.1
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
Tenth International Symposium on Medical Information Processing and Analysis
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