Brain tumor classification and segmentation using sparse coding and dictionary learning.

This paper presents a novel fully automatic framework for multi-class brain tumor classification and segmentation using a sparse coding and dictionary learning method. The proposed framework consists of two steps: classification and segmentation. The classification of the brain tumors is based on brain topology and texture. The segmentation is based on voxel values of the image data. Using K-SVD, two types of dictionaries are learned from the training data and their associated ground truth segmentation: feature dictionary and voxel-wise coupled dictionaries. The feature dictionary consists of global image features (topological and texture features). The coupled dictionaries consist of coupled information: gray scale voxel values of the training image data and their associated label voxel values of the ground truth segmentation of the training data. For quantitative evaluation, the proposed framework is evaluated using different metrics. The segmentation results of the brain tumor segmentation (MICCAI-BraTS-2013) database are evaluated using five different metric scores, which are computed using the online evaluation tool provided by the BraTS-2013 challenge organizers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an accurate brain tumor classification and segmentation and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

3D automatic liver segmentation using feature-constrained Mahalanobis distance in CT images.

Automatic 3D liver segmentation is a fundamental step in the liver disease diagnosis and surgery planning. This paper presents a novel fully automatic algorithm for 3D liver segmentation in clinical 3D computed tomography (CT) images. Based on image features, we propose a new Mahalanobis distance cost function using an active shape model (ASM). We call our method MD-ASM. Unlike the standard active shape model (ST-ASM), the proposed method introduces a new feature-constrained Mahalanobis distance cost function to measure the distance between the generated shape during the iterative step and the mean shape model. The proposed Mahalanobis distance function is learned from a public database of liver segmentation challenge (MICCAI-SLiver07). As a refinement step, we propose the use of a 3D graph-cut segmentation. Foreground and background labels are automatically selected using texture features of the learned Mahalanobis distance. Quantitatively, the proposed method is evaluated using two clinical 3D CT scan databases (MICCAI-SLiver07 and MIDAS). The evaluation of the MICCAI-SLiver07 database is obtained by the challenge organizers using five different metric scores. The experimental results demonstrate the availability of the proposed method by achieving an accurate liver segmentation compared to the state-of-the-art methods.