The integration of segmentation and direct quantification on the left ventricle (LV) from the paired apical views(i.e., apical 4-chamber and 2-chamber together) echo sequence clinically achieves the comprehensive cardiac assessment: multiview segmentation for anatomical morphology, and multidimensional quantification for contractile function. Direct quantification of LV, i.e., to automatically quantify multiple LV indices directly from the image via task-aware feature representation and regression, avoids accumulative error from the inter-step target. This integration sequentially makes a stereoscopical reflection of cardiac activity jointly from the paired orthogonal cross views sequences, overcoming limited observation with a single plane. We propose a K-shaped Unified Network (K-Net), the first end-to-end framework to simultaneously segment LV from apical 4-chamber and 2-chamber views, and directly quantify LV from major- and minor-axis dimensions (1D), area (2D), and volume (3D), in sequence. It works via four components: 1) the K-Net architecture with the Attention Junction enables heterogeneous tasks learning of segmentation task of pixel-wise classification, and direct quantification task of image-wise regression, by interactively introducing the information from segmentation to jointly promote spatial attention map to guide quantification focusing on LV-related region, and transferring quantification feedback to make global constraint on segmentation; 2) the Bi-ResLSTMs distributed in K-Net layer-by-layer hierarchically extract spatial-temporal information in echo sequence, with bidirectional recurrent and short-cut connection to model spatial-temporal information among all frames; 3) the Information Valve tailing the Bi-ResLSTMs selectively exchanges information among multiple views, by stimulating complementary information and suppressing redundant information to make the efficient cross-flow for each view; 4) the Evolution Loss comprehensively guides sequential data learning, with static constraint for frame values, and dynamic constraint for inter-frame value changes. The experiments show that our K-Net gains high performance with a Dice coefficient up to 91.44% and a mean absolute error of the major-axis dimension down to 2.74mm, which reveal its clinical potential.

The wide applications of X-ray computed tomography (CT) bring low-dose CT (LDCT) into a clinical prerequisite, but reducing the radiation exposure in CT often leads to significantly increased noise and artifacts, which might lower the judgment accuracy of radiologists. In this paper, we put forward a domain progressive 3D residual convolution network (DP-ResNet) for the LDCT imaging procedure that contains three stages: sinogram domain network (SD-net), filtered back projection (FBP), and image domain network (ID-net). Though both are based on the residual network structure, the SD-net and ID-net provide complementary effect on improving the final LDCT quality. The experimental results with both simulated and real projection data show that this domain progressive deep-learning network achieves significantly improved performance by combing the network processing in the two domains.

Renal cancer is one of ten most common cancers in human beings. The laparoscopic partial nephrectomy (LPN) becomes the main therapeutic approach in treating renal cancer. Accurate kidney and tumor segmentation in CT images is a prerequisite step in the surgery planning. However, automatic and accurate kidney and renal tumor segmentation in CT images remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new method to perform a precise segmentation of kidney and renal tumor in CT angiography images. This method relies on a three-dimensional (3D) fully convolutional network (FCN) which combines a pyramid pooling module (PPM). The proposed network is implemented as an end-to-end learning system directly on 3D volumetric images. It can make use of the 3D spatial contextual information to improve the segmentation of the kidney as well as the tumor lesion. The experiments conducted on 140 patients show that these target structures can be segmented with a high accuracy. The resulting average dice coefficients obtained for kidney and renal tumor are equal to 0.931 and 0.802 respectively. These values are higher than those obtained from the other two neural networks.

Noise detection accuracy is crucial in suppressing random-valued impulse noise. Both false and miss detections determine the final estimation performance. Deterministic detection methods, which distinctly classify pixels into noisy or uncorrupted pixels, tend to increase the estimation error because some uncorrupted edge points are hard to discriminate from the random-valued impulse noise points. This paper proposes an iterative structure-adaptive fuzzy estimation (SAFE) for random-valued impulse noise suppression. This SAFE method is developed in the framework of Gaussian maximum likelihood estimation. The structure-adaptive fuzziness is reflected by two structure-adaptive metrics based on pixel reliability and patch similarity, respectively. The reliability metric for each pixel (as noise free) is estimated via a novel-minimal-path-based structure propagation to give full consideration of the spatially varying image structures. A robust iteration stopping strategy is also proposed by evaluating the reestimation error of the uncorrupted intensity information. The comparative experimental results show that the proposed structure-adaptive fuzziness can lead to effective restoration. An efficient implementation of this SAFE method is also realized via graphics-processing-unit-based parallelization.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) images are often highly degraded by amplified mottle noise and streak artifacts. Maintaining image quality under low-dose scan protocols is a well-known challenge. Recently, sparse representation-based techniques have been shown to be efficient in improving such CT images. In this paper, we propose a 3D feature constrained reconstruction (3D-FCR) algorithm for LDCT image reconstruction. The feature information used in the 3D-FCR algorithm relies on a 3D feature dictionary constructed from available high quality standard-dose CT sample. The CT voxels and the sparse coefficients are sequentially updated using an alternating minimization scheme. The performance of the 3D-FCR algorithm was assessed through experiments conducted on phantom simulation data and clinical data. A comparison with previously reported solutions was also performed. Qualitative and quantitative results show that the proposed method can lead to a promising improvement of LDCT image quality.

In low dose computed tomography (LDCT) imaging, the data inconsistency of measured noisy projections can significantly deteriorate reconstruction images. To deal with this problem, we propose here a new sinogram restoration approach, the sinogram- discriminative feature representation (S-DFR) method. Different from other sinogram restoration methods, the proposed method works through a 3-D representation-based feature decomposition of the projected attenuation component and the noise component using a well-designed composite dictionary containing atoms with discriminative features. This method can be easily implemented with good robustness in parameter setting. Its comparison to other competing methods through experiments on simulated and real data demonstrated that the S-DFR method offers a sound alternative in LDCT.

A novel retinal vessel enhancement method based on multi-dictionary and sparse coding is proposed in this paper. Two dictionaries are utilized to gain the retinal vascular structures and details, one is the representation dictionary (RD) generated from the original retinal images, and another is the enhancement dictionary (ED) extracted from the corresponding label images. The proposed method represents the input image with RD to get the sparse coefficients via a sparse coding process. Then the enhanced retinal vessel image is obtained from the solved sparse coefficients and ED. Experimental results performed on the DRIVE and STARE databases indicate that the proposed method not only can effectively improve the image contrast but also enhance the details of the retinal vessels.

Minimal path techniques can efficiently extract geometrically curve-like structures by finding the path with minimal accumulated cost between two given endpoints. Though having found wide practical applications (e.g., line identification, crack detection, and vascular centerline extraction), minimal path techniques suffer from some notable problems. The first one is that they require setting two endpoints for each line to be extracted (endpoint problem). The second one is that the connection might fail when the geodesic distance between the two points is much shorter than the desirable minimal path (shortcut problem). In addition, when connecting two distant points, the minimal path connection might become inefficient as the accumulated cost increases over the propagation and results in leakage into some non-feature regions near the starting point (accumulation problem). To address these problems, this paper proposes an approach termed minimal path propagation with backtracking. We found that the information in the process of backtracking from reached points can be well utilized to overcome the above problems and improve the extraction performance. The whole algorithm is robust to parameter setting and allows a coarse setting of the starting point. Extensive experiments with both simulated and realistic data are performed to validate the performance of the proposed method.

To reduce the manual labor time and provide the accuracy of liver tumor segmentation in the treatment planning of radiofrequency ablation (RFA), a novel method for liver tumor image segmentation by nonlocal active contours is proposed in this paper. A multi Gabor feature map of the liver tumor image is computed to describe the homogeneity of patches in a nonlocal way, and the nonlocal comparisons between pairs of patches are used to calculate the active contour energy. The whole energy function is minimized via a level set method to give the final segmentation. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method leads to good liver tumor segmentation with a good robustness to initialization condition. Experiment results show the proposed method can provide segmentation close to manual results, with the mean overlap error (OE) less than 23.86%.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) images are often severely degraded by amplified mottle noise and streak artifacts. These artifacts are often hard to suppress without introducing tissue blurring effects. In this paper, we propose to process LDCT images using a novel image-domain algorithm called "artifact suppressed dictionary learning (ASDL)." In this ASDL method, orientation and scale information on artifacts is exploited to train artifact atoms, which are then combined with tissue feature atoms to build three discriminative dictionaries. The streak artifacts are cancelled via a discriminative sparse representation operation based on these dictionaries. Then, a general dictionary learning processing is applied to further reduce the noise and residual artifacts. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations on a large set of abdominal and mediastinum CT images are carried out and the results show that the proposed method can be efficiently applied in most current CT systems.

In this paper, we present a medical image integrity verification system to detect and approximate local malevolent image alterations (e.g., removal or addition of lesions) as well as identifying the nature of a global processing an image may have undergone (e.g., lossy compression, filtering, etc.). The proposed integrity analysis process is based on nonsignificant region watermarking with signatures extracted from different pixel blocks of interest, which are compared with the recomputed ones at the verification stage. A set of three signatures is proposed. The first two devoted to detection and modification location are cryptographic hashes and checksums, while the last one is issued from the image moment theory. In this paper, we first show how geometric moments can be used to approximate any local modification by its nearest generalized 2-D Gaussian. We then demonstrate how ratios between original and recomputed geometric moments can be used as image features in a classifier-based strategy in order to determine the nature of a global image processing. Experimental results considering both local and global modifications in MRI and retina images illustrate the overall performances of our approach. With a pixel block signature of about 200 bit long, it is possible to detect, to roughly localize, and to get an idea about the image tamper.

This work presents the first method of digital blind forensics within the medical imaging field with the objective to detect whether an image has been modified by some processing (e.g. filtering, lossy compression and so on). It compares two image features: the Histogram statistics of Reorganized Block-based Discrete cosine transform coefficients (HRBD), originally proposed for steganalysis purposes, and the Histogram statistics of Reorganized Block-based Tchebichef moments (HRBT). Both features serve as input of a set of SVM classifiers built in order to discriminate tampered images from original ones as well as to identify the nature of the global modification one image may have undergone. Performance evaluation, conducted in application to different medical image modalities, shows that these image features can help, independently or jointly, to blindly distinguish image processing or modifications with a detection rate greater than 70%. They also underline the complementarity of these features.

The derivation of moment invariants has been extensively investigated in the past decades. In this paper, we construct a set of invariants derived from Zernike moments which is simultaneously invariant to similarity transformation and to convolution with circularly symmetric point spread function (PSF). Two main contributions are provided: the theoretical framework for deriving the Zernike moments of a blurred image and the way to construct the combined geometric-blur invariants. The performance of the proposed descriptors is evaluated with various PSFs and similarity transformations. The comparison of the proposed method with the existing ones is also provided in terms of pattern recognition accuracy, template matching and robustness to noise. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptors perform on the overall better.

Geometric distortions are generally simple and effective attacks for many watermarking methods. They can make detection and extraction of the embedded watermark difficult or even impossible by destroying the synchronization between the watermark reader and the embedded watermark. In this paper, we propose a new watermarking approach which allows watermark detection and extraction under affine transformation attacks. The novelty of our approach stands on a set of affine invariants we derived from Legendre moments. Watermark embedding and detection are directly performed on this set of invariants. We also show how these moments can be exploited for estimating the geometric distortion parameters in order to permit watermark extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is robust to a wide range of attacks: geometric distortion, filtering, compression, and additive noise.

Moments and moment invariants are useful tool in pattern recognition and image analysis. Conventional methods to deal with color images are based on RGB decomposition or graying. In this paper, by using the theory of quaternions, we introduce a set of quaternion Zernike moments (QZMs) for color images in a holistic manner. It is shown that the QZMs can be obtained via the conventional Zernike moments of each channel. We also construct a set of combined invariants to rotation and translation (RT) using the modulus of central QZMs. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptors are more efficient than the existing ones.

Discrete orthogonal moments have been recently introduced in the field of image analysis. It was shown that they have better image representation capability than the continuous orthogonal moments. One problem concerning the use of moments as feature descriptors is the high computational cost, which may limit their application to the problems where the online computation is required. In this paper, we present a new approach for fast computation of the 2-D Tchebichef moments. By deriving some properties of Tchebichef polynomials, and using the image block representation for binary images and intensity slice representation for grayscale images, a fast algorithm is proposed for computing the moments of binary and grayscale images. The theoretical analysis shows that the computational complexity of the proposed method depends upon the number of blocks of the image, thus, it can speed up the computational efficiency as far as the number of blocks is smaller than the image size.

Processing blurred images is a key problem in many image applications. Existing methods to obtain blur invariants which are invariant with respect to centrally symmetric blur are based on geometric moments or complex moments. In this paper, we propose a new method to construct a set of blur invariants using the orthogonal Legendre moments. Some important properties of Legendre moments for the blurred image are presented and proved. The performance of the proposed descriptors is evaluated with various point-spread functions and different image noises. The comparison of the present approach with previous methods in terms of pattern recognition accuracy is also provided. The experimental results show that the proposed descriptors are more robust to noise and have better discriminative power than the methods based on geometric or complex moments.

This paper describes a method for the characterization of coronary artery motion using multislice computed tomography (MSCT) volume sequences. Coronary trees are first extracted by a spatial vessel tracking method in each volume of MSCT sequence. A point-based matching algorithm, with feature landmarks constraint, is then applied to match the 3-D extracted centerlines between two consecutive instants over a complete cardiac cycle. The transformation functions and correspondence matrices are estimated simultaneously, and allow deformable fitting of the vessels over the volume series. Either point-based or branch-based motion features can be derived. Experiments have been conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the method with a matching error analysis.

A novel algorithm for fast computation of the modulated complex lapped transform (MCLT) with sine windowing function is presented. For the MCLT of length-2Minput data sequence, the proposed algorithm is based on computing a length-2Mtype-II generalized discrete Hartley transform. Comparison with existing algorithms shows that the proposed method achieves the minimal number of arithmetic operations.

The modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) and the inverse MDCT (IMDCT) are two of the most computationally intensive operations in layer III of MPEG audio coding standard. In this letter, we present a radix-3 algorithm for efficiently computing the MDCT and the corresponding IMDCT of a sequence with length N=2times3m. Comparison of the computational complexity with some known algorithms shows that the proposed approach reduces significantly the number of arithmetic operations

We present in this letter an efficient direct method for the computation of a length-N type-II generalized discrete Hartley transform (GDHT) when given two adjacent length-N/2 GDHT coefficients. The computational complexity of the proposed method is lower than that of the traditional approach for length Nges8. The arithmetic operations can be saved from 16% to 24% for N varying from 16 to 64. Furthermore, the new approach can be easily implemented

Due to the inherent ill-posedness of PET reconstruction, the reconstructed images usually have noise and edge artifacts, and regularization techniques are needed to produce reasonable results. We propose a new minimum cross-entropy (MXE) image reconstruction method for PET based on the total variation (TV) norm constraint. The use of TV is due to the fact that it can effectively reduce the noise in 2D images while preserving edges. In addition, a multiple level set method was incorporated into image reconstruction to identify the shape of the radioactive objects. It is important for some special applications where the shape of tumors should be identified. The initial emission rates used by the multiphase level set method were estimated using a discrete reconstruction method. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more effective.

This paper presents an efficient method for automatic segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images. A set of directional basis filters based on dyadic wavelet transform is designed to enhance blood vessels. It attempts to utilize the linear combination of the wavelet transforms to fix on the blood vessels directional information in retinal images. The directional maps are processed by thresholding scheme in order to segment blood vessels from the background. The proposed thresholding approach evaluates 2-D entropies based on the gray level-gradient co-occurrence matrix. The 2-D thresholding vector that maximizes the edge class entropies is selected. The thresholding method utilizes the gray level and gradient information in the enhanced image. The new method promises the simpleness and flexibility in many image enhancement and segmentation applications.