In this paper, we propose a new registration method for prone and supine computed tomographic colonography scans using graph matching. We formulate 3-D colon registration as a graph matching problem and propose a new graph matching algorithm based on mean field theory. In the proposed algorithm, we solve the matching problem in an iterative way. In each step, we use mean field theory to find the matched pair of nodes with highest probability. During iterative optimization, one-to-one matching constraints are added to the system in a step-by-step approach. Prominent matching pairs found in previous iterations are used to guide subsequent mean field calculations. The proposed method was found to have the best performance with smallest standard deviation compared with two other baseline algorithms called the normalized distance along the colon centerline (NDACC) ( p = 0.17) with manual colon centerline correction and spectral matching ( p < 1e-5). A major advantage of the proposed method is that it is fully automatic and does not require defining a colon centerline for registration. For the latter NDACC method, user interaction is almost always needed for identifying the colon centerlines.

In this paper, we propose a new graph matching algorithm based on mean field theory. We first convert the original graph matching problem which is a quadratic integer programming problem to a spin model with quadratic interaction by dropping the matching constraints. Then the matching constraints are added to the system iteratively after each round of mean field calculation. Prominent matching pairs found in previous iterations will guide the mean field calculation in the next round. Experiments on the CMU house dataset and a CTC dataset show promising matching results.

Lung nodule detection, especially ground glass opacity (GGO) detection, in helical computed tomography (CT) images is a challenging computer-aided detection (CAD) task due to the enormous variances in nodules' volumes, shapes, appearances, and the structures nearby. Most of the detection algorithms employ some efficient candidate generation (CG) algorithms to spot the suspicious volumes with high sensitivity at the cost of low specificity, e.g. tens even hundreds of false positives per volume. This paper proposes a learning based method to reduce the number of false positives given by CG based on a new general 3D volume shape descriptor. The 3D volume shape descriptor is constructed by concatenating spatial histograms of gradient orientations, which is robust to large variabilities in intensity levels, shapes, and appearances. The proposed method achieves promising performance on a difficult mixture lung nodule dataset with average 81% detection rate and 4.3 false positives per volume.

This paper describes a novel classification method for computer aided detection (CAD) that identifies structures of interest from medical images. CAD problems are challenging largely due to the following three characteristics. Typical CAD training data sets are large and extremely unbalanced between positive and negative classes. When searching for descriptive features, researchers often deploy a large set of experimental features, which consequently introduces irrelevant and redundant features. Finally, a CAD system has to satisfy stringent real-time requirements.This work is distinguished by three key contributions. The first is a cascade classification approach which is able to tackle all the above difficulties in a unified framework by employing an asymmetric cascade of sparse classifiers each trained to achieve high detection sensitivity and satisfactory false positive rates. The second is the incorporation of feature computational costs in a linear program formulation that allows the feature selection process to take into account different evaluation costs of various features. The third is a boosting algorithm derived from column generation optimization to effectively solve the proposed cascade linear programs.We apply the proposed approach to the problem of detecting lung nodules from helical multi-slice CT images. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in comparison against support vector machines, linear discriminant analysis and cascade AdaBoost. Especially, the resulting detection system is significantly sped up with our approach.

We have developed a general-purpose registration algorithm for medical images and volumes. This method models the transformation between images as locally affine but globally smooth. The model also explicitly accounts for local and global variations in image intensities. This approach is built upon a differential multiscale framework, allowing us to capture both large- and small-scale transformations. We show that this approach is highly effective across a broad range of synthetic and clinical medical images.