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- All Subjects: Feature Extraction
- Creators: Pavlicek, William
Description
Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most prevalent cause of death worldwide. Atherosclerosis which is the condition of plaque buildup on the inside of the coronary artery wall is the main cause of CHD. Rupture of unstable atherosclerotic coronary plaque is known to be the cause of acute coronary syndrome. The composition of plaque is important for detection of plaque vulnerability. Due to prognostic importance of early stage identification, non-invasive assessment of plaque characterization is necessary. Computed tomography (CT) has emerged as a non-invasive alternative to coronary angiography. Recently, dual energy CT (DECT) coronary angiography has been performed clinically. DECT scanners use two different X-ray energies in order to determine the energy dependency of tissue attenuation values for each voxel. They generate virtual monochromatic energy images, as well as material basis pair images. The characterization of plaque components by DECT is still an active research topic since overlap between the CT attenuations measured in plaque components and contrast material shows that the single mean density might not be an appropriate measure for characterization. This dissertation proposes feature extraction, feature selection and learning strategies for supervised characterization of coronary atherosclerotic plaques. In my first study, I proposed an approach for calcium quantification in contrast-enhanced examinations of the coronary arteries, potentially eliminating the need for an extra non-contrast X-ray acquisition. The ambiguity of separation of calcium from contrast material was solved by using virtual non-contrast images. Additional attenuation data provided by DECT provides valuable information for separation of lipid from fibrous plaque since the change of their attenuation as the energy level changes is different. My second study proposed these as the input to supervised learners for a more precise classification of lipid and fibrous plaques. My last study aimed at automatic segmentation of coronary arteries characterizing plaque components and lumen on contrast enhanced monochromatic X-ray images. This required extraction of features from regions of interests. This study proposed feature extraction strategies and selection of important ones. The results show that supervised learning on the proposed features provides promising results for automatic characterization of coronary atherosclerotic plaques by DECT.
ContributorsYamak, Didem (Author) / Akay, Metin (Thesis advisor) / Muthuswamy, Jit (Committee member) / Akay, Yasemin (Committee member) / Pavlicek, William (Committee member) / Vernon, Brent (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Recent advances in medical imaging technology have greatly enhanced imaging based diagnosis which requires computational effective and accurate algorithms to process the images (e.g., measure the objects) for quantitative assessment. In this dissertation, one type of imaging objects is of interest: small blobs. Example small blob objects are cells in histopathology images, small breast lesions in ultrasound images, glomeruli in kidney MR images etc. This problem is particularly challenging because the small blobs often have inhomogeneous intensity distribution and indistinct boundary against the background.
This research develops a generalized four-phased system for small blob detections. The system includes (1) raw image transformation, (2) Hessian pre-segmentation, (3) feature extraction and (4) unsupervised clustering for post-pruning. First, detecting blobs from 2D images is studied where a Hessian-based Laplacian of Gaussian (HLoG) detector is proposed. Using the scale space theory as foundation, the image is smoothed via LoG. Hessian analysis is then launched to identify the single optimal scale based on which a pre-segmentation is conducted. Novel Regional features are extracted from pre-segmented blob candidates and fed to Variational Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models (VBGMM) for post pruning. Sixteen cell histology images and two hundred cell fluorescent images are tested to demonstrate the performances of HLoG. Next, as an extension, Hessian-based Difference of Gaussians (HDoG) is proposed which is capable to identify the small blobs from 3D images. Specifically, kidney glomeruli segmentation from 3D MRI (6 rats, 3 humans) is investigated. The experimental results show that HDoG has the potential to automatically detect glomeruli, enabling new measurements of renal microstructures and pathology in preclinical and clinical studies. Realizing the computation time is a key factor impacting the clinical adoption, the last phase of this research is to investigate the data reduction technique for VBGMM in HDoG to handle large-scale datasets. A new coreset algorithm is developed for variational Bayesian mixture models. Using the same MRI dataset, it is observed that the four-phased system with coreset-VBGMM has similar performance as using the full dataset but about 20 times faster.
This research develops a generalized four-phased system for small blob detections. The system includes (1) raw image transformation, (2) Hessian pre-segmentation, (3) feature extraction and (4) unsupervised clustering for post-pruning. First, detecting blobs from 2D images is studied where a Hessian-based Laplacian of Gaussian (HLoG) detector is proposed. Using the scale space theory as foundation, the image is smoothed via LoG. Hessian analysis is then launched to identify the single optimal scale based on which a pre-segmentation is conducted. Novel Regional features are extracted from pre-segmented blob candidates and fed to Variational Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models (VBGMM) for post pruning. Sixteen cell histology images and two hundred cell fluorescent images are tested to demonstrate the performances of HLoG. Next, as an extension, Hessian-based Difference of Gaussians (HDoG) is proposed which is capable to identify the small blobs from 3D images. Specifically, kidney glomeruli segmentation from 3D MRI (6 rats, 3 humans) is investigated. The experimental results show that HDoG has the potential to automatically detect glomeruli, enabling new measurements of renal microstructures and pathology in preclinical and clinical studies. Realizing the computation time is a key factor impacting the clinical adoption, the last phase of this research is to investigate the data reduction technique for VBGMM in HDoG to handle large-scale datasets. A new coreset algorithm is developed for variational Bayesian mixture models. Using the same MRI dataset, it is observed that the four-phased system with coreset-VBGMM has similar performance as using the full dataset but about 20 times faster.
ContributorsZhang, Min (Author) / Wu, Teresa (Thesis advisor) / Li, Jing (Committee member) / Pavlicek, William (Committee member) / Askin, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015