Supine and prone colon registration using quasi-conformal mapping

In virtual colonoscopy, CT scans are typically acquired with the patient in both supine (facing up) and prone (facing down) positions. The registration of these two scans is desirable so that the user can clarify situations or confirm polyp findings at a location in one scan with the same location in the other, thereby improving polyp detection rates and reducing false positives. However, this supine-prone registration is challenging because of the substantial distortions in the colon shape due to the patient's change in position. We present an efficient algorithm and framework for performing this registration through the use of conformal geometry to guarantee that the registration is a diffeomorphism (a one-to-one and onto mapping). The taeniae coli and colon flexures are automatically extracted for each supine and prone surface, employing the colon geometry. The two colon surfaces are then divided into several segments using the flexures, and each segment is cut along a taenia coli and conformally flattened to the rectangular domain using holomorphic differentials. The mean curvature is color encoded as texture images, from which feature points are automatically detected using graph cut segmentation, mathematic morphological operations, and principal component analysis. Corresponding feature points are found between supine and prone and are used to adjust the conformal flattening to be quasi-conformal, such that the features become aligned. We present multiple methods of visualizing our results, including 2D flattened rendering, corresponding 3D endoluminal views, and rendering of distortion measurements. We demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our registration method by illustrating matched views on both the 2D flattened colon images and in the 3D volume rendered colon endoluminal view. We analytically evaluate the correctness of the results by measuring the distance between features on the registered colons.     

Lines of curvature for polyp detection in virtual colonoscopy

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) is a helpful addition to laborious visual inspection for preselection of suspected colonic polyps in virtual colonoscopy. Most of the previous work on automatic polyp detection makes use of indicators based on the scalar curvature of the colon wall and can result in many false-positive detections. Our work tries to reduce the number of false-positive detections in the preselection of polyp candidates. Polyp surface shape can be characterized and visualized using lines of curvature. In this paper, we describe techniques for generating and rendering lines of curvature on surfaces and we show that these lines can be used as part of a polyp detection approach. We have adapted existing approaches on explicit triangular surface meshes, and developed a new algorithm on implicit surfaces embedded in 3D volume data. The visualization of shaded colonic surfaces can be enhanced by rendering the derived lines of curvature on these surfaces. Features strongly correlated with true-positive detections were calculated on lines of curvature and used for the polyp candidate selection. We studied the performance of these features on 5 data sets that included 331 pre-detected candidates, of which 50 sites were true polyps. The winding angle had a significant discriminating power for true-positive detections, which was demonstrated by a Wilcoxon rank sum test with p < 0.001. The median winding angle and inter-quartile range (IQR) for true polyps were 7.817 and 6.770 - 9.288 compared to 2.954 and 1.995 - 3.749 for false-positive detections.     

Employing topographical height map in colonic polyp measurement and false positive reduction

CT colonography (CTC) is an emerging minimally invasive technique for screening and diagnosing colon cancers. Computer aided detection (CAD) techniques can increase sensitivity and reduce false positives. Inspired by the way radiologists detect polyps via 3D virtual fly-through in CTC, we borrowed the idea from geographic information systems to employ topographical height map in colonic polyp measurement and false positive reduction. After a curvature based filtering and a 3D CT feature classifier, a height map is computed for each detection using a ray-casting algorithm. We design a concentric index to characterize the concentric pattern in polyp height map based on the fact that polyps are protrusions from the colon wall and round in shape. The height map is optimized through a multi-scale spiral spherical search to maximize the concentric index. We derive several topographic features from the map and compute texture features based on wavelet decomposition. We then send the features to a committee of support vector machines for classification. We have trained our method on 394 patients (71 polyps) and tested it on 792 patients (226 polyps). Results showed that we can achieve 95% sensitivity at 2.4 false positives per patient and the height map features can reduce false positives by more than 50%. We compute the polyp height and width measurements and correlate them with manual measurements. The Pearson correlations are 0.74 (p=0.11) and 0.75 (p=0.17) for height and width, respectively.     

Volumetric colon wall unfolding using harmonic differentials

Volumetric colon wall unfolding is a novel method for virtual colon analysis and visualization with valuable applications in virtual colonoscopy (VC) and computer-aided detection (CAD) systems. A volumetrically unfolded colon enables doctors to visualize the entire colon structure without occlusions due to haustral folds, and is critical for performing efficient and accurate texture analysis on the volumetric colon wall. Though conventional colon surface flattening has been employed for these uses, volumetric colon unfolding offers the advantages of providing the needed quantities of information with needed accuracy. This work presents an efficient and effective volumetric colon unfolding method based on harmonic differentials. The colon volumes are reconstructed from CT images and are represented as tetrahedral meshes. Three harmonic 1-forms, which are linearly independent everywhere, are computed on the tetrahedral mesh. Through integration of the harmonic 1-forms, the colon volume is mapped periodically to a canonical cuboid. The method presented is automatic, simple, and practical. Experimental results are reported to show the performance of the algorithm on real medical datasets. Though applied here specifically to the colon, the method is general and can be generalized for other volumes.     

Colon segmentation and colonic polyp detection using cellular neural networks and three-dimensional template matching

Abstract: In this study, an automatic three-dimensional computer-aided detection system for colonic polyps was developed. Computer-aided detection for computed tomography colonography aims at facilitating the detection of colonic polyps. First, the colon regions of whole computed tomography images were carefully segmented to reduce computational burden and prevent false positive detection. In this process, the colon regions were extracted by using a cellular neural network and then the regions of interest were determined. In order to improve the segmentation performance of the study, weights in the cellular neural network were calculated by three heuristic optimization techniques, namely genetic algorithm, differential evaluation and artificial immune system. Afterwards, a three-dimensional polyp template model was constructed to detect polyps on the segmented regions of interest. At the end of the template matching process, the volumes geometrically similar to the template were emhanced.     

改进的M2det内窥镜息肉检测方法

结直肠癌是一种致命的疾病,作为息肉的肠腺瘤被认为是结直肠癌的主要病因,因此在临床诊断中发现肠息肉是一项至关重要的任务.息肉检测通常由医生操作内窥镜来实现,由于肠道环境复杂,息肉影像数据量大,小尺度息肉不易辨识,息肉检查过程除了极其依赖医生经验之外,工作压力和强度也给医生带来了极大的负担,因此需要借助计算机辅助诊断技术来...     

Geodesic distance-weighted shape vector image diffusion

This paper presents a novel and efficient surface matching and visualization framework through the geodesic distance-weighted shape vector image diffusion. Based on conformal geometry, our approach can uniquely map a 3D surface to a canonical rectangular domain and encode the shape characteristics (e.g., mean curvatures and conformal factors) of the surface in the 2D domain to construct a geodesic distance-weighted shape vector image, where the distances between sampling pixels are not uniform but the actual geodesic distances on the manifold. Through the novel geodesic distance-weighted shape vector image diffusion presented in this paper, we can create a multiscale diffusion space, in which the cross-scale extrema can be detected as the robust geometric features for the matching and registration of surfaces. Therefore, statistical analysis and visualization of surface properties across subjects become readily available. The experiments on scanned surface models show that our method is very robust for feature extraction and surface matching even under noise and resolution change. We have also applied the framework on the real 3D human neocortical surfaces, and demonstrated the excellent performance of our approach in statistical analysis and integrated visualization of the multimodality volumetric data over the shape vector image.     

Feature selection using mutual information in CT colonography

Computed tomographic (CT) colonography is a promising alternative to traditional invasive colonoscopic methods used in the detection and removal of cancerous growths, or polyps in the colon. Existing computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) algorithms used in CT colonography typically employ the use of a classifier to discriminate between true and false positives generated by a polyp candidate detection system based on a set of features extracted from the candidates. However, these classifiers often suffer from a phenomenon termed the curse of dimensionality, whereby there is a marked degradation in the performance of a classifier as the number of features used in the classifier is increased. In addition, an increase in the number of features used also contributes to an increase in computational complexity and demands on storage space.This paper investigates the benefits of feature selection on a polyp candidate database, with the aim of increasing specificity while preserving sensitivity. Two new mutual information methods for feature selection are proposed in order to select a subset of features for optimum performance. Initial results show that the performance of the widely used support vector machine (SVM) classifier is indeed better with the use of a small set of features, with receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) measures reaching 0.78-0.88.     

基于样例学习的任意光照下的人脸3D重建方法

待匹配的人脸图像与数据库中的原型图像之间的光照差异是自动人脸识别的主要瓶颈问题之一。提出了一种基于样例学习方式的3D人脸形状重建方法,既可以生成任意光照条件下的数据库中人脸图像,也可以对待识别图像进行重新光照,合成无阴影的图像。该方法在建立人脸数据库时利用光度立体技术分离人脸图像的纹理和形状信息,并用多面体模型在最小二乘意义下恢复其3D信息并更新法向量场以克服阴影误差,从而可以利用计算机图形学的方法合成任意光照条件下和小角度姿态改变时的人脸图像;在识别时采用数据库中3D数据的线性组合形式对输入图像建模,以估计其3D信息,从而可以重新照明。在YaleB人脸数据库上的实验表明,在建立3D人脸数据库后,该方法可以快速恢复输入单幅图像中人脸的3D信息,并生成任意光照条件的该人脸图像。     

A Performance Evaluation of Volumetric 3D Interest Point Detectors

This paper presents the first performance evaluation of interest points on scalar volumetric data. Such data encodes 3D shape, a fundamental property of objects. The use of another such property, texture (i.e. 2D surface colouration), or appearance, for object detection, recognition and registration has been well studied; 3D shape less so. However, the increasing prevalence of 3D shape acquisition techniques and the diminishing returns to be had from appearance alone have seen a surge in 3D shape-based methods. In this work, we investigate the performance of several state of the art interest points detectors in volumetric data, in terms of repeatability, number and nature of interest points. Such methods form the first step in many shape-based applications. Our detailed comparison, with both quantitative and qualitative measures on synthetic and real 3D data, both point-based and volumetric, aids readers in selecting a method suitable for their application.     

三维人脸数据的获取及人脸特征自动定位

介绍了一种快速获取人脸三维面貌数据的结构光相移测量技术,并利用这种高速的相移技术在获取三维面貌数据的同时获得人脸纹理背景图像,结合二维人脸图像中的人脸特征识别手段,应用到三维人脸图像中,可以让计算机自动提取人脸图像的主要特征点.首先介绍了高速相移技术的基本原理,介绍了二维人脸图像中的积分投影方法来求取人脸轮廓粗略位置的方法,接着介绍了将二维图像做纹理映射到三维数据里面的方法,结合三维高度信息的曲线分析、曲率判断等,快速的提取出了人脸的三维特征.经实验验证,此方法对于三维人脸特征的自动定位有很高的准确性和通用性.     

Adaptive Fractal Image Sequence Coding by Variable Shape Decomposition

A two-phase fractal image sequence compression system is proposed. In the classification phase, according to the texture attribution a testing solid image block is assigned to its corresponding texture class. The texture attribution is derived from the tomographic block projection classification for the finite projection directions at the three-dimensional (3D) space. In the adaptive coding phase, both the algorithm of the 3D projection classification and the 3D variable shape decomposition are incorporated into the variable shape block transformation for image sequence. By applying this variable shape block transformation algorithm to fractal image sequence coding scheme, we can obtain a promising performance.     

3D object model reconstruction from image sequence based on photometric consistency in volume space

This paper presents a system that can reconstruct a photorealistic 3D object model from an image sequence captured at arbitrary viewpoints. The whole system consists of four steps: camera calibration, volumetric modeling, polygonal model formation and texture mapping. We adopt the shape-from-silhouette approach for volumetric modeling. There are two common types of object surface that are difficult to reconstruct—textureless surface and concave surface. To tackle the problems, we propose to perform the volumetric modeling based on the constraints of viewpoint proximity and photometric consistency in the volume space. The volumetric model is converted to the mesh model for efficient manipulation. Finally, the texture map is generated from the image sequence to give the 3D model a photorealistic appearance. Some reconstructed object models are presented to demonstrate the superior performance of our system as compared with the conventional modeling technique based on the photo-consistency in the image space.     

融合注意力机制的肠道息肉分割多尺度卷积神经网络

肠道息肉分割能够提供息肉在结肠中的位置和形态信息,方便医生依据其结构变化程度来推断 癌变可能性,有利于结肠癌的早期诊断和治疗。针对许多现有的卷积神经网络所提取的多尺度特征有限,且常 引入冗余和干扰特征,难以应对复杂多变的肠道息肉分割问题,提出了一种融合注意力机制的肠道息肉分割多 尺度卷积神经网络(CNN)。首先,设计不同比例金字塔池化策略提取丰富的多尺度上下文信息;然后,通过在 网络中融入通道注意力机制,模型能够根据目标自适应地选择合适的局部上下文信息和全局上下文信息进行特 征集成;最后,联合金字塔池化策略和通道注意力机制构建多尺度有效语义融合解码网络,增强模型对形状、 大小复杂多变的肠道息肉分割的鲁棒性。实验结果表明,本文模型分割的 Dice 系数、IoU 和灵敏度在 CVC-ClinicDB 数据集上分别为 90.6%,84.4%和 91.1%,在 ETIS-Larib 数据集上分别为 80.6%,72.6%和 79.0%, 其能够从肠镜图像中准确、有效地分割出肠道息肉。     

基于DYOLO神经网络的超声图像肾脏检测

为便于慢性肾脏疾病的计算机辅助诊断,提出一种基于DYOLO神经网络学习模型的自动超声图像肾脏检测方法。将YOLOv3和可变形卷积网络集成在一个端到端学习框架中,使得DYOLO可根据肾脏的大小和形状自适应调节接收域,以适应肾脏的各种纹理特征形变,实现临床超声图像中肾脏的自动检测。在自制KidneyDetec超声图像肾脏检测数据集上的实验结果表明,该方法在DYOLO网络模型的图像输入尺寸为416像素×416像素和608像素×608像素的情况下分别取得了89.6%和90.5%的平均精度均值,相比基于深度学习的目标检测方法具有更高的检测速度和检测精度,适用于慢性肾脏疾病的早期诊断。     

3DIVE: An Immersive Environment for Interactive Volume Data Exploration

This paper describes an immersive system,called 3DIVE,for interactive volume data visualization and exploration inside the CAVE virtual environment.Combining interactive volume rendering and virtual reality provides a netural immersive environment for volumetric data visualization.More advanced data exploration operations,such as object level data manipulation,simulation and analysis ,are supported in 3DIVE by several new techniques,In particular,volume primitives and texture regions ae used for the rendering,manipulation,and collision detection of volumetric objects;and the region-based rendering pipeline is integrated with 3D image filters to provide an image-based mechanism for interactive transfer function design.The system has been recently released as public domain software for CAVE/ImmersaDesk users,and is currently being actively used by various scientific and biomedical visualization projects.     

Uniform texture synthesis and texture mapping using global parameterization

Texture mapping and texture synthesis are two popular methods for the decoration of surfaces with visual detail. Here, an existing challenge is to preserve, or at least balance, two competing metrics: scale and angle. In this paper we present two methods for this, both based on global conformal parameterization. First, we describe a texture synthesis algorithm for surfaces with arbitrary topology. By using the conformal parameterization, the 3D surface texture synthesis problem can be converted to a 2D image synthesis problem, which is more intuitive, easier, and conceptually simpler. While the conformality of the parameterization naturally preserves the angles of the texture, in this paper we provide a multi-scale technique to also maintain a more uniform area scaling factor. A second novel contribution is to employ the global parameterization to simultaneously preserve orthogonality and size in texture mapping. For this, we show that a conformal factor-driven mass-spring method offers a convenient way to trade off these two qualitative metrics. Our algorithms are simple, efficient and automatic, and they are theoretically sound and universal to general surfaces as well.     

Super-vector coding features extracted from both depth buffer and view-normal-angle images for part-based 3D shape retrieval

We have witnessed 3D shape models abundant in many application fields including 3D CAD/CAM, augmented/mixed reality (AR/MR), and entertainment. Creating 3D shape models from scratch is still very expensive. Efficient and accurate methods for shape retrieval is essential for 3D shape models to be reused. To retrieve similar 3D shape models, one must provide an arbitrary 3D shape as a query. Most of the research on 3D shape retrieval has been conducted with a “whole” shape as a query (aka whole-to-whole shape retrieval), while a “part” shape (aka part-to-whole shape retrieval) is more practically requested as a query especially by mechanical engineering with 3D CAD/CAM applications. A “part” shape is naturally constructed by a 3D range scanner as an input device. In this paper, we focus on the efficient method for part-to-whole shape retrieval where the “part” shape is assumed to be given by a 3D range scanner. Specifically, we propose a Super-Vector coding feature with SURF local features extracted from the View-Normal-Angle image, or the image synthesized by taking account of the angle between the view vector and the surface normal vector, together with the depth-buffered image, for part-to-whole shape retrieval. In addition, we propose a weighted whole-to-whole re-ranking method taking advantage of global information based on the result of part-to-whole shape retrieval. Through experiments we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the previous methods with or without re-ranking.     

改进的精密机械加工零件表面缺陷检测算法

对加工表面纹理缺陷进行可靠的检测分析可以有效提高机械加工零件表面精加工的水平。基于计算机视觉技术对机械加工零件表面实现自动缺陷检测,由于机械加工零件表面纹理的特殊性,常用的灰度图像分割方法对机械加工零件表面缺陷的检测不适用;且其表面的缺陷信息无法预先得知,其图像分割是一个非监督纹理分割问题,对此提出了一种改进的模糊聚类缺陷检测算法,实现了对机械加工零件表面缺陷的自动化检测,实验结果证明了该算法的可行性。     

Context preserving maps of tubular structures

When visualizing tubular 3D structures, external representations are often used for guidance and display, and such views in 2D can often contain occlusions. Virtual dissection methods have been proposed where the entire 3D structure can be mapped to the 2D plane, though these will lose context by straightening curved sections. We present a new method of creating maps of 3D tubular structures that yield a succinct view while preserving the overall geometric structure. Given a dominant view plane for the structure, its curve skeleton is first projected to a 2D skeleton. This 2D skeleton is adjusted to account for distortions in length, modified to remove intersections, and optimized to preserve the shape of the original 3D skeleton. Based on this shaped 2D skeleton, a boundary for the map of the object is obtained based on a slicing path through the structure and the radius around the skeleton. The sliced structure is conformally mapped to a rectangle and then deformed via harmonic mapping to match the boundary placement. This flattened map preserves the general geometric context of a 3D object in a 2D display, and rendering of this flattened map can be accomplished using volumetric ray casting. We have evaluated our method on real datasets of human colon models.