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3D livewire and live-vessel : minimal path methods for interactive medical image segmentation

University of British Columbia

Medical image analysis is a ubiquitous and essential part of modem health care. A crucial first step to this is segmentation, which is often complicated by many factors including subject diversity, pathology, noise corruption, and poor image resolution. Traditionally, manual tracing by experts was done. While considered accurate, this process is time consuming and tedious, especially when performed slice-by-slice on three-dimensional (3D) images over large datasets or on two-dimensional (2D) but topologically complicated images such as a retinography. On the other hand, fully-automated methods are typically faster, but work best with data-dependent, carefully tuned parameters and still require user validation and refinement. This thesis contributes to the field of medical image segmentation by proposing a highly-automated, interactive approach that effectively merges user knowledge and efficient computing. To this end, our work focuses on graph-based methods and offer globally optimal solutions. First, we present a novel method for 3D segmentation based on a 3D Livewire approach. This approach is an extension of the 2D Livewire framework, and this method is capable of handling objects with large protrusions, concavities, branching, and complex arbitrary topologies. Second, we propose a method for efficiently segmenting 2D vascular networks, called ‘Live-Vessel’. Live-Vessel simultaneously extracts vessel centrelines and boundary points, and globally optimizes over both spatial variables and vessel radius. Both of our proposed methods are validated on synthetic data, real medical data, and are shown to be highly reproducible, accurate, and efficient. Also, they were shown to be resilient to high amounts of noise and insensitive to internal parameterization.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2008-10-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/2736

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/