KEYWORDS: Image segmentation, Ultrasonography, In vivo imaging, Vascular diseases, Arteries, Doppler effect, Scanners, Transducers, Image processing algorithms and systems
Ultrasound has become highly popular to monitor atherosclerosis, by scanning the carotid artery. The screening involves measuring the thickness of the vessel wall and diameter of the lumen. An automatic segmentation of the vessel lumen, can enable the determination of lumen diameter. This paper presents a fully automatic segmentation algorithm, for robustly segmenting the vessel lumen in longitudinal B-mode ultrasound images. The automatic segmentation is performed using a combination of B-mode and power Doppler images. The proposed algorithm includes a series of preprocessing steps, and performs a vessel segmentation by use of the marker-controlled watershed transform. The ultrasound images used in the study were acquired using the bk3000 ultrasound scanner (BK Ultrasound, Herlev, Denmark) with two transducers "8L2 Linear" and "10L2w Wide Linear" (BK Ultrasound, Herlev, Denmark). The algorithm was evaluated empirically and applied to a dataset of in-vivo 1770 images recorded from 8 healthy subjects. The segmentation results were compared to manual delineation performed by two experienced users. The results showed a sensitivity and specificity of 90.41±11.2 % and 97.93±5.7% (mean±standard deviation), respectively. The amount of overlap of segmentation and manual segmentation, was measured by the Dice similarity coefficient, which was 91.25±11.6%. The empirical results demonstrated the feasibility of segmenting the vessel lumen in ultrasound scans using a fully automatic algorithm.
Synthetic Aperture (SA) imaging produces high-quality images and velocity estimates of both slow and fast flow at high frame rates. However, grating lobe artifacts can appear both in transmission and reception. These affect the image quality and the frame rate. Therefore optimization of parameters effecting the image quality of SA is of great importance, and this paper proposes an advanced procedure for optimizing the parameters essential for acquiring an optimal image quality, while generating high resolution SA images. Optimization of the image quality is mainly performed based on measures such as F-number, number of emissions and the aperture size. They are considered to be the most contributing acquisition factors in the quality of the high resolution images in SA. Therefore, the performance of image quality is quantified in terms of full-width at half maximum (FWHM) and the cystic resolution (CTR). The results of the study showed that SA imaging with only 32 emissions and maximum sweep angle of 22 degrees yields a very good image quality compared with using 256 emissions and the full aperture size. Therefore the number of emissions and the maximum sweep angle in the SA can be optimized to reach a reasonably good performance, and to increase the frame rate by lowering the required number of emissions. All the measurements are performed using the experimental SARUS scanner connected to a λ/2-pitch transducer. A wire phantom and a tissue mimicking phantom containing anechoic cysts are scanned using the optimized parameters for the transducer. Measurements coincide with simulations.
This paper presents a novel automatic method for detection of B-lines (comet-tail artifacts) in lung ultrasound scans. B-lines are the most commonly used artifacts for analyzing the pulmonary edema. They appear as laser-like vertical beams, which arise from the pleural line and spread down without fading to the edge of the screen. An increase in their number is associated with presence of edema. All the scans used in this study were acquired using a BK3000 ultrasound scanner (BK Ultrasound, Denmark) driving a 192-element 5:5 MHz wide linear transducer (10L2W, BK Ultrasound). The dynamic received focus technique was employed to generate the sequences. Six subjects, among those three patients after major surgery and three normal subjects, were scanned once and Six ultrasound sequences each containing 50 frames were acquired. The proposed algorithm was applied to all 300 in-vivo lung ultrasound images. The pleural line is first segmented on each image and then the B-line artifacts spreading down from the pleural line are detected and overlayed on the image. The resulting 300 images showed that the mean lateral distance between B-lines detected on images acquired from patients decreased by 20% in compare with that of normal subjects. Therefore, the method can be used as the basis of a method of automatically and qualitatively characterizing the distribution of B-lines.
KEYWORDS: Signal attenuation, Signal to noise ratio, Tissues, Ultrasonography, Bladder, In vivo imaging, Interference (communication), Visualization, Image quality, Image segmentation
Time gain compensation (TGC) is essential to ensure the optimal image quality of the clinical ultrasound scans. When large fluid collections are present within the scan plane, the attenuation distribution is changed drastically and TGC compensation becomes challenging. This paper presents an automated hierarchical TGC (AHTGC) algorithm that accurately adapts to the large attenuation variation between different types of tissues and structures. The algorithm relies on estimates of tissue attenuation, scattering strength, and noise level to gain a more quantitative understanding of the underlying tissue and the ultrasound signal strength. The proposed algorithm was applied to a set of 44 in vivo abdominal movie sequences each containing 15 frames. Matching pairs of in vivo sequences, unprocessed and processed with the proposed AHTGC were visualized side by side and evaluated by two radiologists in terms of image quality. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to evaluate whether radiologists preferred the processed sequences or the unprocessed data. The results indicate that the average visual analogue scale (VAS) is positive ( p-value: 2.34 × 10-13) and estimated to be 1.01 (95% CI: 0.85; 1.16) favoring the processed data with the proposed AHTGC algorithm.
This paper presents a set of novel structural texture features for quantifying nuclear chromatin patterns in cells on a conventional Pap smear. The features are derived from an initial segmentation of the chromatin into bloblike texture primitives. The results of a comprehensive feature selection experiment, including the set of proposed structural texture features and a range of different cytology features drawn from the literature, show that two of the four top ranking features are structural texture features. They also show that a combination of structural and conventional features yields a classification performance of 0.954±0.019 (AUC±SE) for the discrimination of normal (NILM) and abnormal (LSIL and HSIL) slides. The results of a second classification experiment, using only normal-appearing cells from both normal and abnormal slides, demonstrates that a single structural texture feature measuring chromatin margination yields a classification performance of 0.815±0.019. Overall the results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed structural approach and that it is possible to detect malignancy associated changes (MACs) in Papanicoloau stain.
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