Joint Segmentation and Spiculation Detection for Ill-defined and Spiculated Mammographic Masses Yimo Taoa,b ∗, Shih-Chung B. Lob , Matthew T. Freedmanc , and Jianhua Xuana a Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA 22203, USA b Department of Radiology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC 20007, USA c Department of Oncology, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington DC 20057, USA

ABSTRACT A learning-based approach integrating the use of pixel level statistical modeling and spiculation detection is presented for the segmentation of mammographic masses with ill-defined margins and spiculations. The algorithm involves a multi-phase pixel-level classification, using a comprehensive group of regional features, to generate a pixel level mass-conditional probability map (PM). Then, mass candidate along with background clutters are extracted from the PM by integrating the prior knowledge of shape and location of masses. A multi-scale steerable ridge detection algorithm is employed to detect spiculations. Finally, all the object level findings, including mass candidate, detected spiculations, and clutters, along with the PM are integrated by graph cuts to generate the final segmentation mask. The method was tested on 54 masses (51 malignant and 3 benign), all with ill-defined margins and irregular shape or spiculations. The ground truth delineations were provided by five experienced radiologists. Area overlap ratio of 0.766 (±0.144) and 0.642 (±0.173) were obtained for segmenting the whole mass and only the margin portion, respectively. Williams index of area and contour based measurements indicated that segmentation results of the algorithm well agreed with the radiologists’ delineation. Most importantly, the proposed approach is capable of including mass margin and its extension which are considered as key features for breast lesion analyses.

1. INTRODUCTION Clinically, shape and margin characteristics of a mammographic mass are regarded by radiologists as two most important features for breast cancer diagnosis. While malignant masses usually have ill-defined margin and irregular shape and/or spiculation, benign masses usually have well-defined margin. More specifically, a spiculated mass consists of a central mass body with “extensions”, hence the resulting stellate shape. From medical image analysis perspectives, the image features (e.g., texture and intensity patterns) associated with the extended regions and ill-defined borders are important information for the mass analysis. Therefore, a segmentation algorithm, that is tailored to delineate the mass body and periphery including its irregular details or spiculations, is technically desirable. Many algorithms have been proposed for automatic mammographic mass segmentation. Kupinski and Giger [1] proposed two region-growing approaches based on the radial gradient index and a probabilistic model. Kinnard et al. [2] extended the probabilistic model based method by further analyzing the steepest change of the cost functions. Their method was found to be able to further include some of ill-defined mass boundaries. Te Brake and Karssemeijer [3] proposed a discrete dynamic contour model, which began as a set of vertices connected by edges (initial contour) and grew the subject according to internal and external forces. Li et al. [4] developed a method that employed k-means classification to categorize pixels as belonging to the region of interest (ROI) or background. Sahiner et. al [5] proposed a method consisting of segmentation initialization by a pixelintensity based clustering algorithm followed by region growing to improve the boundary shape; then the initial result was further augmented by an active contour algorithm for shape refinement. Recently, Shi et al. [6] proposed a level set based approach for mass segmentation. The segmented masks were found to be able to improve the performance for discriminating benign and malignant masses in comparison with their previous work. Dominguez and Nandi [7] proposed a method based on contour tracing using dynamic programming. A review of mammographic mass segmentation algorithms can be found in the literature [8]. While encouraging results have been obtained in the aforementioned works, fully automatic segmentation of mammographic masses ∗ Contact:

[email protected]

Figure 1. Flow chart of the proposed approach.

remains challenging, especially, for how to effectively include ill-defined margin and spiculations. In this work, a multi-level learning-based segmentation technique is proposed for segmenting various types of masses. The approach specifically tackles the challenge of mass margin and associated extension, while minimizing the risk of over-segmentation.

2. MATERIALS AND METHODS The proposed segmentation method is composed of three major components (shown as rounded rectangles) in Fig. 1: (1) pixel-wise soft labeling and segmentation, (2) object-scale mass and noisy clutters detection, and (3) segmentation integration by the graph cuts [9] algorithm to integrate all the object level findings and the pixel-level probability map (PM). The pixel-level mass and non-mass class labeling and segmentation works as follows: given a candidate ROI, our system will label each pixel with the probability likelihood of whether it comes from a non-mass (particular glandular tissues) or mass tissue by examining a 2D sliding window centered at that pixel; this labeled or probability weighted image can be viewed as a segmentation map of the mass region in the original image. After this, the object-level image classification or detection module takes the label map along with other raw information, and then locates the mass candidate and possible noisy clutters from the labeled image. Finally, the graph cuts algorithm is applied to ensure accurate and clean mass segmentation by integrating the pixel level PM and all the object-level findings. Spiculation map generated by the spiculation detection module may also be integrated into the final graph cuts segmentation algorithm in order to include faint spiculations.

2.1 Segmentation by Pixel-Level Labeling We treat the segmentation of mammographic mass as a probabilistic pixel-level labeling problem. Our system first computes a comprehensive collection of pixel-wise features from a squared sub region of interest (sROI) across 11×11 pixel in the large ROI. These features include texture features computed using gray level co-occurrence matrix [10] and 2D local binary patterns [11], shape features of Vesselness and Blobness computed based on the eigen-analysis of hessian matrix, and a group of first order gray-level statistics features. A total 30 dimensional features (denoted as x0 ) are calculated for each scanned sROI. Based on our ground truth annotation maps of mass and non-mass, feature vectors are split into positives and negatives and fed into an off-line classifier learning process. For the pixel-level classification problem, the size of training samples (as scanned region of size 11×11) can be really large (greater than 100,000). This requires the choosing classifier with good scalability. We choose

linear discriminant analysis (LDA) along with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) as our classifier, i.e., GMM is used to learn the distribution of the classes in the LDA projected subspace. For each of the binary mass and non-mass class, LDA is first exploited to further project the extracted feature vector x0 into a vector of x in a lower dimension. Then, the Expectation-Minimization (EM) algorithm with multiple random initialization trials is used to determine the parameter set θ = {αi , μi , Σi }ki=1 in GMM consisting of k-Gaussian distributions. Here, αi is the prior, μi is the mean, and Σi is the covariance matrix of the ith distribution. Here, we briefly describe the steps of the EM algorithm. Assume the distribution of random variables X ∈ Rd (d is the dimensionality in the LDA projected space) is a mixture of k Gaussians given by:

f (x|θ) =

k 

1 1 αi  exp{− (x − μi )T Σ−1 i (x − μi )} 2 (2π)d |Σi | i=1

(1)

Given a set of observations x1 , x2 , ..., xn , the maximum liklihood estimation of θ is θML = arg max f (x1 , ..., xn |θ) θ

(2)

The EM algorithm iteratively converges from the initial estimation of θ to θML according to two steps: 1) Expectation step:

αi f (xt |μi , Σi ) wti = k i = 1, ..., k t = 1, ..., n j=1 αi f (xt |μj , Σj ) 1 wti n t=1

(3)

n

α ˆi ←

(4)

n n   μ ˆi ← ( wti xt )/( wti ) t=1

(5)

t=1

n n   ˆi ← ( Σ wti (xt − μ ˆi )(xt − μ ˆi )T )/( wti ) t=1

(6)

t=1

The first step computes the probability that an instance xt is generated by the ith normal distribution. Then, the maximization step uses the probabilities to update the current value of θ. The process is repeated until the log-likelihood is increased by less than a predefined threshold from one iteration to the next. As there are many different types of tissues inside the mammogram, such as vessel, glandular tissues, etc., the single-layer LDA classifier may have many false positives originating from this multi-tissue background. To reduce these mass false positives, a multi-phase classification approach is adopted. It starts with the positive class output PM from single phase, and treats it as a new image. This output image contains for each pixel a probability that it belongs to the structure to be enhanced (mass). Next, another round of pixel-level feature extraction (and selection) and LDA-GMM training process is conducted using both the original image and the output image from the previous phase(s). All these intensity-texture-shape features, in the joint image and PM domain, are used to train a new classifier. This process can be iterated many times, as a simplified “Auto-Context” [12]. The rationale behind this approach is that the structure to be enhanced will be more distinctive in the (intermediate) enhanced image than in the original image. Therefore, adding features from these weighted images will result in potentially more discriminative features between the positive regions and the spurious responses from the previous phase(s). Illustrative examples of generated PMs are shown in Fig. 2. It can be clearly seen the generated PM is able to enhance the mass tissue structure, meanwhile suppress the false responses of breast tissues.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 2. Results from the pixel-level classification: (a) the original ROI image, (b) the mass probability map produced by the two-phase pixel-scale classifiers, (c) the segmentation ground truth generated from multiple radiologists (see section 3 for detail), (d) the contours superimposed on the original ground truth image of the ground truth with three radiologists’ consensus (white contour) and the joint mask with all radiologists’ annotation (black contour).

2.2 Object-level Labeling and Detection At this stage, the goal is to locate and extract mass candidate along with possible noisy clutters on the computed 2D PM. The multi-scale blobness filtering, with a larger smoothing kernel (than the pixel-level Blobness feature computation step) is used to capture the mass shape again. It is applied on each pixel to obtain a blobness likelihood map. Then, we multiply the pixel-level PM with this blobness likelihood map to obtain another probability map which we refer to as shape-prior refined probability map (SPM). The SPM helps to suppress spurious responses (false positives). The Otsu thresholding method [13] is applied for discrete quantization of SPM. To further break the possible connection between the candidate and noisy clutters caused by spiculation connections, a morphology operation using a rotating structuring element (the ROSE algorithm [14]) is applied on the quantized binary image. Finally, connected component labeling is used to obtain disjointed objects. Simple size based rules and position prior information are used to select one mass candidate per ROI. And the remaining disconnected components are regarded as noisy clutters.

2.3 Spiculation Detection For accurate segmentation of spiculated masses, spiculation detection is essential for further inclusion of the (potential) spiculation margin. In this work, the steerable ridge detection approach of Jacob and Unser [15] is adopted and further generalized into a multi-scale analysis framework to detect the presence of radiating linear structures as potential spiculations. We employ steerable ridge detectors constructed by Gaussian kernels and their derivatives up to the fourth order. Because of the property of steerable functions (e.g., Gaussian kernels and their derivatives), the optimized ridge detection could be implemented in a very efficient manner. Specifically, the optimal orientation θ and the maximum line-strength response at each pixel position could be computed efficiently as a linear combination of the responses of the convolution results of un-rotated kernels with the image. Fig. 3 shows an example of the ridge detection on a synthetic image† . In order to obtain spicules at different widths, we extend the ridge detection algorithm with a multi-scale analysis approach. Specifically, we achieve this by progressively increasing the scale (σ = 3, 5, 7) of ridge detector. An estimate of the ridge scale at each pixel is obtained by normalizing the line-strength obtained at each scale, and choosing the scale that gives the largest response. The line-strength and orientation along with the chosen scale are taken as the representative of the pixel in the image. Non maximal-suppression, i.e., thresholding with hysteresis, is then used to extract the backbone of each linear structure, followed by thinning to simplify the connectivity of the resulting image. To reduce the false positive spicule candidates generated from other linear structures in the mammogram (e.g., ligaments, ducts, blood vessels, etc.), we use several geometric rules for postfiltering based on position, direction relationship of the spicule candidates with the extracted mass candidate. After obtaining the filtered spicule candidates, a spiculation map is obtained by applying the region growing technique (using the detected spicules as seed) on the multi-scale line-strength image. The final output of the spiculation detection module is a binary mask, where the foreground object(s) represents the detected potential spicule pixels. Fig. 4 shows an example of the detected spicules and the obtained spiculation map. †

The image is obtained from the literature of Zwiggelaar et al. [16].

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 3. Example of spiculation detection on synthetic image: (a) synthetic linear structures superimposed on a fatty mammographic background, (b) the ridge detector response, (c) the extracted backbone of the spiculation, and (d) the superimposed backbone on the original image.

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

Figure 4. Results of multi-scale spiculation detection: (a) the original images, (b) the multi-scale line-strength image, (c) the detected spicules, (d) the detected spicules superimposed on original image, and (e) the final spiculation map.

Using the detected spiculation pixels, we compute the ratio between the area of detected spiculation to the area of extracted mass candidate as the spiculation measurement. If the ratio is larger than a pre-defined threshold, we determine the mass as spiculated. This classification decision will be used in the final segmentation integration stage (see section 2.4) to determine whether to include these spicules.

2.4 Segmentation Integration by Graph Cuts At the final stage, we employ graph cuts [17] to integrate all the object-level findings, including mass candidate, noisy clutters and spiculations, along with the pixel level PM to generate the final segmentation mask. We construct an undirected graph G = υ, ε defined by a set of nodes υ (image pixels) and a set of directed edges ε which connect these nodes. In this graph, there are two distinct nodes (or terminals) s and t, called the source and sink, respectively. The edges connected to the source or sink are called t-links, such as (s, p) and (p, t). For the segmentation problem, an energy function E is defined based on the graph G by considering two criteria: (1) the segmentation is guided both by the foreground (i.e. mass) and background (i.e. non-mass) appearance probabilistic statistics; (2) the segmentation is smooth, reflecting a tendency to a solidity of objects. Therefore, we seek a labeling system f , which assigns one label to each pixel in the image, to minimize the energy function E as follows: E = Edata (f ) + Esmooth (f ) =



D(p, fp ) +

p∈P



V (p, q)T (fp = fq )

(7)

(p,q)∈N

where Esmooth is a piecewise smoothness term, Edata is a data error term, P is the set of pixels in the image, V (p, q) is a smoothness penalty function, D(p, fp ) is a data penalty function, N is a four-neighbor system, fp is the label of a pixel p, and T (•) is 1 if its argument is true and 0 otherwise. In this bipartioning problem, if fp = 1, the pixel belong to the mass, otherwise, the pixel is not the mass. We define V (p, q) as follows: V (p, q) = exp(−

(Ip − Iq ) ) 2δ 2

Regarding the data penalty term, we use the negative log-likelihoods function as:

(8)

D(p, fp ) = − ln Pr(Ip |fp )

(9)

where Pr(Ip |fp ) is the probability of pixel p belonging to class fp = 1. In our case, the Pr(Ip |fp ) corresponds to the value in the PM. A very attractive property of graph cuts is that it can easily incorporate topological constraints into the final segmentation by setting appropriate weights of t-links in the graph. These constraints indicate some image pixels a priori known to be a part of the foreground or background. In our scenario, on one hand, we have extracted a mass candidate along with spiculation map (if the mass is determined to be spiculated), which must be included in the final segmentation of a mass. On the other hand, we regard the noisy clutters as regions must be excluded from the final segmentation. We use the weights of edges defined in (10) and (11) to completely define the graph G (see [17] for detail derivation). ⎧ ⎨ ∞ w(p, s) = 0 ⎩ D(p, fp = 1)

p ∈ Foreground p ∈ Background otherwise

(10)

⎧ ⎨ 0 ∞ w(p, t) = ⎩ D(p, fp = 0)

p ∈ Foreground p ∈ Background otherwise

(11)

where w(p, S) and w(p, T ) are the weights of edges connecting the pixel p to the source s and the sink t respectively. By integrating the object level detections along with the mass PM into the graph cuts framework, the optimal segmentation of mammographic mass could be obtained in one single step by finding the minimum cost cut C on the graph G. The cut c, determining a unique labeling function f in the image, can be computed exactly in polynomial time via a standard max-flow algorithm for two terminal graph cuts.

3. EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS Image Database: In this study, we used a dataset containing a total of 54 (51 malignant and 3 benign) ROIs. The spatial resolution of the image was re-sampled to 100μm×100μm. All selected masses were described by radiologists as possessing ill-defined margins and irregular or spiculated shapes. In this study, we collected a total of 5 radiologists’ delineated masks independently for each mass. We then defined the final ground truth mask for each mass by setting the pixel as the foreground (i.e. mass) where at least three radiologists reached censuses. The remaining pixels were regarded as the background (i.e. non-mass). Pixel-Scale Classification Results: For the pixel level classification, we ran a three-fold cross-validation experiment using the database. A two-phase classification scheme was adopted after experiments, since we found that using more phases did not substantially improve the classification performance. The classification accuracy could be improved from 86.15% by using the single layer LDA-GMM classifier to 87.81% by using the multi-phase classifier. The effect of the multi-phase approach is illustrated by the enhancement results shown in Fig. 5. It is evident that the further reduction of false positive samples, with increasing classification phases, thus improves the overall pixel-scale classification performance. Segmentation Results: To measure the level of agreement between radiologists’ annotation and the segmented masses, we adopted three measurements including the area overlap measure (AOR), and two contour-based measurements of the average minimum distance (AM IN DIST ), and the Hausdorff distance (HSDIST ). Detailed mathematical definitions of these measurements can be found in the literature [5]. The box and whisker plots of the corresponding distributions of these segmentation measurements are shown in Fig. 6, with AOR of 0.766 (±0.144), AM IN DIST of 9.79 (±10.12), and HSDIST of 58.38 (±31.25). The ROIs shown in Fig. 7 demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm. It can be seen that the contour produced by our algorithm is capable of accurately delineating the mass body contour and include sufficient

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 5. Example outputs of the multi-phase pixel-scale classification: (a) the original ROI, (b) the PM generated by the first phase classifier, (c) the PM generated of the two-phase classifiers, and (d) the ground truth provided by the radiologists. Notice that the noisy responses generated from the chest border tissues (see the up-right corner of the image) has been clearly suppressed by the two-phase classifiers.

Figure 6. The box and whisker plots of the distribution of the segmentation metrics. The vertical lines of the boxes correspond to the lower, median and upper quartile. Outliers are represented by cross.

amount of mass margin portion. It is robust in segmenting masses in the presence of ill-defined texture patterns and unsmooth intensity changes inside the mass. In addition, our method is robust in segmenting masses surrounded by bright tissues (as shown in the second and third rows in Fig. 7) on one or more sides within ROI. Conventional region growing based methods have notorious “leaking” problems, where the segmented contours may leak into bright areas which are not actual mass tissue. In cases shown, it is clearly seen that our algorithm produces acceptable segmentation contours, in comparison to the manual segmentation. Multi-Observer Agreement: To measure the consistency of our segmentation with multiple radiologists and the consistency within multiple radiologists themselves, we adopted the Williams index (W I) [18]. The W I is a ratio of the agreement of rater j = i to the group versus the overall group agreement and is defined mathematically as follows:  W Ii =

n−2 2



n  j=1,i=j n−1 

sij

n 

j=1,j=i k>j

(12) sjk

where sij is a measure of similarity or agreement between raters i and j. We used AOR, the reciprocal of AM IN DIST , and the reciprocal of HSDIST as the similarity measurements. If the upper limit of the confidence interval (CI) of W I is greater than the value one, we can conclude that the measurement data are consistent with the hypothesis that the individual observer agrees with the group at least as well as the group members agree with each other (i.e., the individual observer is a reliable member of the group). The CI is estimated with a jack knife scheme [18]. The W I of the three segmentation measurements are shown in Fig. 8. Margin Segmentation Results: In this study, we also evaluated the segmentation performance of our algorithm on the margin part. The mass margin part is defined by subtracting the mass core part from the complete ground-truth mask. The mass core part is obtained through a series of morphological operations on the mask: first, we use the ROSE algorithm to remove the connected spicules and boundary jaggings; then, morphological erosion of the mask with a circular element of size max(4, 0.15∗req ) is carried, where req is the radius of equivalent

Figure 7. Segmentation results: from left to right, they are the original ROI, segmentation result of our algorithm, manual segmentation, and the contours superimposed on the original image of our algorithm (black contour) and manual segmentation (white contour). The margin and shape BI-RADS descriptors of a mass provided by one radiologist is also shown in label under images in the first column.

Figure 8. The W I for the algorithm and the radiologists using the AOR, AM IN DIST and HSDIST .

(a)

(b)

Figure 9. Margin segmentation results: (a) Box and whisker plots of the distribution of M AOR, (b) the W I for the algorithm and the radiologists using the M AOR.

circle‡ of the mass, and the remaining mask is defined as the mass core part. We measured the margin area overlapping ratio (M AOR) of the segmented masses produced by our algorithm with the ground truth margin mask. Box and whisker plot of the distribution of the segmentation results are shown in Fig. 9 (a), with M ARO of 0.642 (±0.173). We also measured the W I of M ARO between the algorithm and multiple radiologists, which is shown in Fig. 9 (b). It is observed that our method agreed with multiple radiologists in segmenting mass margin portion.

4. CONCLUSIONS Our method proposed a multi-level segmentation framework by first generating a mass class PM at the pixel scale, then extracting the mass candidate and noisy clutters from the PM; spiculation detection based on a multi-scale steerable ridge detection algorithm was also investigated to locate spiculation pixels; finally, we used the graph cuts segmentation algorithm to integrate all the object level detections to obtain the final mass segmentation. This approach was validated using a dataset containing masses with ill-defined margins and irregular or spiculated shapes. W I of 1.002±0.010 (95% confidence interval) and 0.9815±0.021 were obtained respectively for segmenting the whole mass and the margin portion. This indicated that the results of our algorithm agreed with the ground truth provided by multiple experts. The proposed approach is appealing and has the following advantages: • By supervised image sub-patch level modeling (ISLM), the algorithm could enhance the mass structure to be segmented, while substantially suppressing the influences from irrelevant tissues. Thus, the algorithm could accurately and robustly segmenting masses in the presence of overlapping or surrounding dense glandular tissues and chest borders. Traditional region growing based methods (e.g., [2]) may easily leak into these unwanted areas, if they are designed to include more mass margin portions. • The ill-defined margin appearance and large visual variations of the masses are normalized in the intermediate output through the ISLM step. Since the intensity and texture inconsistency within the mass and its margin part is reduced in the intermediate output, more mass margins could be included relatively easily in comparison with methods directly using the image intensity and gradient information (e.g., [6, 7]). • With the help provided by spiculation detection, our method could more accurately delineate the irregular or spiculated shape of a mass, which would benefit the mass characterization module, i.e., classification of benign and malignant masses, in mammographic CAD/CADx systems, and thus to improve their positive predictive ability. The mass segmentation (soft) mask was a desired by-product of our approach, which could be used as the image content descriptors for analyzing the characteristics of the mammographic mass. These features would be useful for automatic diagnosis of malignancy of breast lesions and to retrieve mammograms with similar image patterns in a content-based image retrieval system. We plan to investigate the use of these features in the future study. Acknowledgment This project was supported in part by an NIH/NCI grant (No. R33CA102960). ‡

The equivalent circle is defined as the circle with the same area as the mass.

REFERENCES [1] M. Kupinski and M. Giger, “Automated seeded lesion segmentation on digital mammograms,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 17(4), pp. 510–517, 1998. [2] L. Kinnard, S.-C. B. Lo, E. Makariou, T. Osicka, P. Wang, M. F. Chouikha, and M. T. Freedman, “Steepest changes of a probability-based cost function for delineation of mammographic masses: A validation study,” Medical Physics 31(10), pp. 2796–2796, 2004. [3] G. Te Brake and N. Karssemeijer, “Segmentation of suspicious densities in digital mammograms,” Medical Physics 28, pp. 259–266, 2001. [4] H. Li, Y. Wang, K. Liu, S.-C. B. Lo, and M. Freedman, “Computerized radiographic mass detection - part I: lesion site selection by morphological enhancement and contextual segmentation,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 20(4), pp. 289–301, 2001. [5] B. Sahiner, H.-P. Chan, N. Petrick, M. A. Helvie, and L. M. Hadjiiski, “Improvement of mammographic mass characterization using spiculation measures and morphological features,” Medical Physics 28, pp. 1455–1465, 2001. [6] J. Shi, B. Sahiner, H.-P. Chan, J. Ge, L. M. Hadjiiski, M. A. Helvie, A. Nees, Y.-T. Wu, J. Wei, C. Zhou, Y. Zhang, and J. Cui, “Characterization of mammographic masses based on level set segmentation with new image features and patient information.,” Medical Physics 35(1), pp. 280–290, 2008. [7] A. Dom´ınguez and A. Nandi, “Improved dynamic-programming-based algorithms for segmentation of masses in mammograms,” Medical Physics 34, pp. 4256–4269, 2007. [8] M. Elter and A. Horsch, “CADx of mammographic masses and clustered microcalcifications: a review,” Medical Physics 36, pp. 2052–2068, 2009. [9] Y. Boykov and G. Funka-Lea, “Graph cuts and efficient nd image segmentation,” International Journal of Computer Vision 70(2), pp. 109–131, 2006. [10] R. Haralick, “Statistical and structural approaches to texture,” in Proceedings of the IEEE, 67(5), pp. 786– 804, 1979. [11] T. Ojala, M. Pietik¨ ainen, and T. M¨ aenp¨ a¨a, “Multiresolution gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification with local binary patterns,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 24, pp. 971–987, 2002. [12] Z. Tu, “Auto-context and its application to high-level vision tasks,” in International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 1–8, 2008. [13] N. Otsu, “A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 9, pp. 62–66, 1979. [14] B. D. Thackray and A. C. Nelson, “Semi-automatic segmentation of vascular network images using a rotating structuring element (ROSE) with mathematical morphology anddual feature thresholding,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 12(3), pp. 385–392, 1993. [15] M. Jacob and M. Unser, “Design of steerable filters for feature detection using canny-like criteria,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 26(8), pp. 1007–1019, 2004. [16] R. Zwiggelaar, S. Astley, C. Boggis, and C. Taylor, “Linear structures in mammographic images: detection and classification,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 23(9), pp. 1077–1086, 2004. [17] Y. Boykov and V. Kolmogorov, “An experimental comparison of min-cut/max-flow algorithms for energy minimization in vision,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 26(9), pp. 1124– 1137, 2004. [18] V. Chalana, Y. Kim, et al., “A methodology for evaluation of boundary detection algorithms on medical images,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging 16(5), pp. 642–652, 1997.

Joint Segmentation and Spiculation Detection for Ill ...

a Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Arlington, ... The pixel-level mass and non-mass class labeling and segmentation works as.

597KB Sizes 2 Downloads 401 Views

Recommend Documents

Joint Segmentation and Spiculation Detection for Ill ...
[2] extended the probabilistic model based method by further analyzing the steepest change of the cost functions. Their method was found to be able to further include some of ill-defined mass boundaries. Te Brake and Karssemeijer [3] proposed a discr

Joint DOA Estimation and Multi-User Detection for ...
signals impinging an array of antennas has been a .... denotes conjugate-transpose of a matrix. ..... assumed to have a non-zero correlation with the desired user ...

Joint DOA Estimation and Multi-User Detection for ... - IEEE Xplore
the transmitted data, uniquely identifies a desired user. The task of recognizing a ..... position is more important in the spatial spectrum than the peak value itself.

Joint NDT Image Restoration and Segmentation Using ... - IEEE Xplore
Abstract—In this paper, we propose a method to simultaneously restore and to segment piecewise homogeneous images degraded by a known point spread ...

Protein Word Detection using Text Segmentation Techniques
Aug 4, 2017 - They call the short consequent sequences (SCS) present in ..... In Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th ... ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile.

Texture Detection for Segmentation of Iris Images - CiteSeerX
Asheer Kasar Bachoo, School of Computer Science, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, ..... than 1 (called the fuzzification factor). uij is the degree of membership of xi.

Multilevel learning-based segmentation of ill-defined ...
shape, margin, and density were measured by a senior radi- ologist according to ... ure 2d shows the size of these masses ranged from 5 to 50 mm. The size of a ...

A Piggyback System for Joint Entity Mention Detection ...
We release to the public the GERDAQ evaluation data- set for A2W. GERDAQ .... competition dataset, which consists of 800,000 queries. First we polished the ...

A Piggyback System for Joint Entity Mention Detection ...
in Tables 4 and 5 plus the number of features in Table 6, for a total of 96 features. ..... In comparison to the NE-annotation of the previous sec- tion, we notice that ...

Topic Segmentation with Shared Topic Detection and ...
Jul 23, 2007 - †College of Information Sciences and Technology. The Pennsylvania State University. University Park, PA 16802. ‡College of Computing.

Protein Word Detection using Text Segmentation ... - Research
Aug 4, 2017 - to the task of extracting ”biological words” from protein ... knowledge about protein words, we propose to ..... A tutorial introduction to the.

Implementation of Brain Tumour Detection Using Segmentation ... - IJRIT
destroy all healthy brain cells. It can also indirectly ... aim in a large number of image processing applications is to extract important features from the image data, from which a description .... HSOM combine the idea of regarding the image segmen

Weakly-supervised Joint Sentiment-Topic Detection from Text
traditional media [1]. Driven by the ... Y. He and S. Rüger are with Knowledge Media Institute, The Open ...... of Computing, Imperial College London, where.

Weakly-supervised Joint Sentiment-Topic Detection ...
C. Lin and R. Everson are with Computer Science, College of Engineering, ...... supervised approach based on a spectral clustering al- gorithm [27], except .... amazon evil worst east militari scari killer fail charg room order guard plot middl armi.

Endogenous Market Segmentation for Lemons
Sellers may send some messages to buyers (explicit). Or, they .... Stango (2004) for an online used computer market. 5Although many ... economy where the informational free-riding problem is so severe that a socially efficient technology .... Sellers

ILL-policy.pdf
Page 1 of 1. Interlibrary Loan Policy. Library materials are borrowed for library customers from other libraries if. needed items or subjects cannot be found in the ...

Prevention Prevention and Detection Detection ...
IJRIT International Journal of Research in Information Technology, Volume 2, Issue 4, April 2014, Pg: 365- 373 ..... Packet passport uses a light weight message authentication code (MAC) such as hash-based message ... IP Spoofing”, International Jo

Affine layer segmentation and adjacency graphs for ...
We illustrate the proposed approach to a satellite image sequence of water vapor in ... affine motion model for the voting and region clustering. Hence multiple ...

Robust Speaker segmentation and clustering for ...
cast News segmentation systems([7]), in order to be able to index the data. 2 ... to the meeting or be videoconferencing. Two main ... news clustering technology.

Endogenous Market Segmentation for Lemons
Information asymmetry between sellers and buyers often prevents socially desirable ..... where the informational free-riding problem is so severe that a socially efficient technology cannot ... a unit of the good, whose quality is either high or low.