7 - A survey on neutrosophic medical image segmentation

Medical-image segmentation is of primary importance in the development of computer assisted detection (CAD) of mammographic masses. Image segmentation is used for finding regions of interest (ROI) within mammograms that are further processed to estimate their likelihood of being a potential lesion or mass. This task can be stated as follows: €œA gray-scale image is represented as a 1D array X = (x1, x2,...,xN), where xn is an input feature for pixel n and N is the total number of pixels in the image. The input feature vector xn may be a D dimensional vector or simply the gray-scale value of the pixel n. Let the underlying true segmentation of the image be denoted as Y = (y1, y2,..., yN). It is assumed that the number of classes is predetermined as a set of known class labels I‰l, where l Iµ {1,..., L{ and therefore the class label of pixel n is indicated as y n ∈{I‰ l } L l=1 . The task is to predict the A·n estimate of the segmentation for each pixel. In an automated system, such likelihood estimates are generated using a classifier that takes as input some features that describe region properties, e.g., image texture. The segmentation of digital mammograms is a difficult task. A number of different approaches have been adopted in this area with varying success. Broadly speaking, image segmentation can be carried out either as: (1) image preprocessing step with the main objective of identifying regions of interest (spatially coherent collection of pixels within the image) and a subsequent feature extraction and classification step is required to characterize a given region of interest as either €œnormal€ or €œsuspicious€; or (2) part of the overall classification scheme, where the likelihood of each pixel being €œsuspicious is calculated to generate a probability image using pixel-based features as input to a classifier. The probability image is thereafter thresholded to give both the segmentation and classification output. The main difference between (1) and (2) is that in the first case, image segmentation is needed before classification can be performed; whereas in the second case, classification and segmentation are both based on thresholding probability estimates of pixels and are achieved at the same time. The image segmentation approaches, with the aim of finding regions of interest, were first attempted in digital mammography with varying techniques, including global thresholding, region growing, region clustering, template matching, edge operators and filtering, and edge-based hybrid methods. Image segmentation is developed from pixel-based probability estimation is underpinned by modeling features using parametric methods, Gaussian mixture modeling, Markov random fields, and other methods. A detailed discussion on mammogram-based image segmentation with their algorithms is available in Singh and Bovis. Experience shows that it is quite difficult to select an outright winning image-segmentation method, since different approaches have been shown to be suitable for different data sets and show varied performance under different experimental conditions. However, there is a consensus that image segmentation in medical imaging is most successful when explicitly using a priori information about the problem to be studied.

The purpose of the research is to develop a universal algorithm for partial texture segmentation of any visual images. The main peculiarity of the proposed segmentation procedure is the extraction of only homogeneous fine-grained texture segments present in the images. At first, an initial seed point is found for the largest and most homogeneous segment of the image. This initial seed point of the segment is expanded using a region growing method. Other texture segments of the image are extracted analogously in turn. At the second stage, the procedure of merging the extracted segments belonging to the same texture class is performed. Then, the detected texture segments are input to a neural network with competitive layers which accomplishes more accurate delineation of the shapes of the extracted texture segments. The proposed segmentation procedure is fully unsupervised, i.e., it does not use any a priori knowledge on either the type of textures or the number of texture segments in the image. The research results in development of the segmentation algorithm realized as a computer program tested in a series of experiments that demonstrate its efficiency on grayscale natural scenes.

– Medical image segmentation is considered the most precarious element in the analysis and processing of real-life images in the clinical sector. Actually, segmentation effects affect the subsequent procedures of image evaluation, life object illustration and description, feature dimensions and the subsequent considerable task levels such as object categorization. In that case, medical image segmentation is the most essential and crucial aspect for aiding the visualization, delineation and depiction of regions of interest for any particular image. The aspect of physical segmentation of a picture is not just challenging and time-consuming task to do, but also problematic to assure accuracy considering the wide-range image modalities and unguided image quantities which have to be observed. In that case, it now becomes fundamental to evaluate the present approaches of image segmentation based on the application of computing algorithms which require the interaction of users with evaluating medical images. In the process of image segmentation, an anatomic classification requires to be extracted or defined to be projected effectively and independently. In that case, this contribution is focused on image segmentation to extract details for decision-making in the clinical sector. The paper presents generalized and relative techniques that have been categorized into three groups: pixel-centre, edge-centred and region-centred techniques. The paper also provides a highlight of the strengths and weaknesses of these techniques in reference to the appropriateness of a wide-range application in medical image segmentation.

Ultrasound imaging can distinctly display the morphology and structure of internal organs within the human body, enabling the examination of organs like the breast, liver, and thyroid. It can identify the locations of tumors, nodules, and other lesions, thereby serving as an efficacious tool for treatment detection and rehabilitation evaluation. Typically, the attending physician is required to manually demarcate the boundaries of lesion locations, such as tumors, in ultrasound images. Nevertheless, several issues exist. The high noise level in ultrasound images, the degradation of image quality due to the impact of surrounding tissues, and the influence of the operator’s experience and proficiency on the determination of lesion locations can all contribute to a reduction in the accuracy of delineating the boundaries of lesion sites. In the wake of the advancement of deep learning, its application in medical image segmentation is becoming increasingly prevalent. For instance, while the U-Net model has demonstrated a favorable performance in medical image segmentation, the convolution layers of the traditional U-Net model are relatively simplistic, leading to suboptimal extraction of global information. Moreover, due to the significant noise present in ultrasound images, the model is prone to interference. In this research, we propose an Attention Residual Network model (ARU-Net). By incorporating residual connections within the encoder section, the learning capacity of the model is enhanced. Additionally, a spatial hybrid convolution module is integrated to augment the model’s ability to extract global information and deepen the vertical architecture of the network. During the feature fusion stage of the skip connections, a channel attention mechanism and a multi-convolutional self-attention mechanism are respectively introduced to suppress noisy points within the fused feature maps, enabling the model to acquire more information regarding the target region. Finally, the predictive efficacy of the model was evaluated using publicly accessible breast ultrasound and thyroid ultrasound data. The ARU-Net achieved mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) values of 82.59% and 84.88%, accuracy values of 97.53% and 96.09%, and F1-score values of 90.06% and 89.7% for breast and thyroid ultrasound, respectively.

Neutrosophic set (NS) is a powerful tool to deal with indeterminacy. In this paper, the neutrosophic set is applied to the image domain and a novel edge detection technique is proposed. Noise reduction of images is a challenging task in image processing. Salt and pepper noise is one kind of noise that affects a grayscale image significantly. Generally, the median filter is used to reduce salt and pepper noise; it gives optimum results while compared to other image filters. Median filter works only up to a certain level of noise intensity. Here we proposed a neighborhood-based image filter called nbd-filter, it works perfectly for gray image regardless of noise intensity. It reduces salt and pepper noise significantly at any noise level and produces a noise-free image. Further, we proposed an edge detection algorithm based on the neutrosophic set, it detectsedges efficiently for images corrupted by noise and noise-free images. Since most of the real-life images consists of indeterminate regions, neutrosophy is a perfect tool for edge detection. The main advantage of the proposed edge detector is, it is a simple and efficient technique and detect edges more efficient than conventional edge detectors.

Iterative relative fuzzy connectedness for multiple objects with multiple seeds

Image segmentation plays a crucial role in many medical-imaging applications, by automating or facilitating the delineation of anatomical structures and other regions of interest. In this paper explaining current segmentation approaches in medical image segmentation and then reviewed with an emphasis on the advantages and disadvantages of these methods and showing the implemented outcomes of the thresholding, clustering,

Need for medical imaging has immensely increased to diagnose functionality of organs and tissues. Application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computerized tomography scan (CT scan) has automated the process of disease prediction which otherwise would need manual intervention of experienced physicians. Critical transplants and tumor diagnosis of kidney, heart and liver could be very challenging without the application of high-resolution medical imaging. Semantic image segmentation helps to identify features within the image and label them to demarcate the background from organs and tumors formed on them. Current proposed model is built by applying image segmentation using deep learning models by training 3D image information obtained from KITS-19 using CNN U-Net architecture to segregate essential tumor details from the kidney background images. Considering the evaluation of medical condition based on imagery is very challenging due to lack of pre-processing methods to handle unbalanced nature of class distribution which is common in medical imaging. In the current research, we apply state-of-the-art convolution neural network and deep learning models to predict the tumor in MRI imagery. We performed evaluation of a subset of 60 CT scans with slice thickness values obtained from KiTS19 dataset. We also compared the image segmentation model with BRATS’2013 challenging dataset also to validate the prediction of tumor in brain MRI scan images. Performance evaluation of kidney and tumor features obtained through threefold cross validation comparing with ground truth gave us dice coefficient score of 0.96 while tumor segmentation prediction was close to 0.80. We believe the performance can be increased through higher GPU memory requirements, which was a limitation to our existing GPU hardware. Nevertheless, the possibility of applying improved deep learning model based on existing results and can be a promising step forward in medical imaging segmentation.

Clustering algorithm is a widely used segmentation method in image processing applications. The algorithm can be easily implemented; however in the occurrence of noise during image acquisition, this might affect the processing results. In order to overcome this drawback, this paper presents a new clustering-based segmentation technique that may be able to find different applications in image segmentation. The proposed algorithm called Denoising-based (DB) clustering algorithm has three variations namely, Denoising-based-K-means (DB-KM), Denoising-based-Fuzzy C-means (DB-FCM), and Denoising-based-Moving K-means (DB-MKM). The proposed DB-clustering algorithms are able to minimize the effects of the Salt-and-Pepper noise during the segmentation process without degrading the fine details of the images. These methods incorporate a noise detection stage to the clustering algorithm, producing an adaptive segmentation technique specifically for segmenting the noisy images. The results obtained quantitatively and qualitatively have favored the proposed DB-clustering algorithms, which consistently outperform the conventional clustering algorithms in segmenting the noisy images. Thus, these DB-clustering algorithms could be possibly used as pre- or post-processing (i.e., segmenting images into regions of interest) in consumer electronic products such as television and monitor with their capability of reducing noise effect <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .

Image segmentation has an important role in many image processing applications. Several methods exist for segmenting an image. However, this technique is still a relatively open topic for which various research works are regularly presented. With the recent developments on complex networks theory, image segmentation techniques based on graphs has considerably improved. In this paper, we present a new perspective of image segmentation, by applying three of the most efficient community detection algorithms, Louvain, infomap and stability optimization based on the louvain algorithm, and we extract communities in which the highest modularity feature is achieved. After we show that this measure is invariant to non-structural change on image, which mean that the image segmentation is also invariant to rotation. Finally we evaluate the three proposed algorithms for Berkeley database images, and we show that our results can outperform other segmentation methods in terms of accuracy and can achieve much better segmentation results.

Early diabetes diagnosis allows patients to begin treatment on time, reducing or eliminating the risk of serious consequences. In this paper, we propose the Neutrosophic-Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (N-ANFIS) for the classification of diabetes. It is an extension of the generic ANFIS model. Neutrosophic logic is capable of handling the uncertain and imprecise information of the traditional fuzzy set. The suggested method begins with the conversion of crisp values to neutrosophic sets using a trapezoidal and triangular neutrosophic membership function. These values are fed into an inferential system, which compares the most impacted value to a diagnosis. The result demonstrates that the suggested model has successfully dealt with vague information. For practical implementation, a single-value neutrosophic number has been used; it is a special case of the neutrosophic set. To highlight the promising potential of the suggested technique, an experimental investigation of the well-known Pima Indian diabetes dataset is presented. The results of our trials show that the proposed technique attained a high degree of accuracy and produced a generic model capable of effectively classifying previously unknown data. It can also surpass some of the most advanced classification algorithms based on machine learning and fuzzy systems.

Outlier detection in neutrosophic sets by using rough entropy based weighted density method

The real-time processing is getting more and more important in many image processing applications. Image segmentation is one of the most fundamental tasks image analysis. As a consequence, many different approaches for image segmentation have been proposed. The watershed transform is a well-known image segmentation tool. The watershed transform is a very data intensive task. To achieve acceleration and obtain real-time processing of watershed algorithms, parallel architectures and programming models for multicore computing have been developed. This paper focuses on the survey of the approaches for parallel implementation of sequential watershed algorithms on multicore general purpose CPUs: homogeneous multicore processor with shared memory. To achieve an efficient parallel implementation, it’s necessary to explore different strategies (parallelization/distribution/distributed scheduling) combined with different acceleration and optimization techniques to enhance parallelism. In this paper, we give a comparison of various parallelization of sequential watershed algorithms on shared memory multicore architecture. We analyze the performance measurements of each parallel implementation and the impact of the different sources of overhead on the performance of the parallel implementations. In this comparison study, we also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the parallel programming models. Thus, we compare the OpenMP (an application programming interface for multi-Processing) with Ptheads (POSIX Threads) to illustrate the impact of each parallel programming model on the performance of the parallel implementations.

Image segmentation is an important step in image processing. Major advances in the field of medical imaging have provided physicians with powerful and non-invasive techniques to probe the structure, function, and pathology of the human body. This information requires significant innovations in all aspect of image processing. Manual tracing of object boundaries generally suffers from poor reproducibility of results and it is also tedious and time consuming. Further, manual segmentations are often restricted to two dimensional (2D) slice-wise processing, which often suffers from inconsistency across segmented slices. Quantitative analysis of medical images requires reproducible, accurate, and efficient segmentation methods. By making use of medical image segmentation approaches accurate, repeatable, quantitative data must be efficiently extracted in order to support the spectrum of biomedical investigations and clinical activities, from diagnosis to radiotherapy as well as to surgery. Purpose of this review is to identify the set of methods that have been used for medical image segmentation over the past three decades, and to provide an opportunity to view the transitions that have occurred as this research area has developed. In this paper, various approaches of medical image segmentation, available algorithms for deformable models are reviewed and their advantages, disadvantages, and limitations are discussed.

In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained tremendous popularity for various imaging related tasks such as artificial image generation to support AI training. GANs are especially useful for medical imaging-related tasks where training datasets are usually limited in size and heavily imbalanced against the diseased class. We present a systematic review, following the PRISMA guidelines, of recent GAN architectures used for medical image analysis to help the readers in making an informed decision before employing GANs in developing medical image classification and segmentation models. We have extracted 54 papers that highlight the capabilities and application of GANs in medical imaging from January 2015 to August 2020 and inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. Our results show four main architectures of GAN that are used for segmentation or classification in medical imaging. We provide a comprehensive overview of recent trends in the application of GANs in clinical diagnosis through medical image segmentation and classification and ultimately share experiences for task-based GAN implementations.