Synthesis of intensity gradient and texture information for efficient three-dimensional segmentation of medical volumes.

We propose a framework that efficiently employs intensity, gradient, and textural features for three-dimensional (3-D) segmentation of medical (MRI/CT) volumes. Our methodology commences by determining the magnitude of intensity variations across the input volume using a 3-D gradient detection scheme. The resultant gradient volume is utilized in a dynamic volume growing/formation process that is initiated in voxel locations with small gradient magnitudes and is concluded at sites with large gradient magnitudes, yielding a map comprising an initial set of partitions (or subvolumes). This partition map is combined with an entropy-based texture descriptor along with intensity and gradient attributes in a multivariate analysis-based volume merging procedure that fuses subvolumes with similar characteristics to yield a final/refined segmentation output. Additionally, a semiautomated version of the aforestated algorithm that allows a user to interactively segment a desired subvolume of interest as opposed to the entire volume is also discussed. Our approach was tested on several MRI and CT datasets and the results show favorable performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art ITK-SNAP technique.

Automatic image segmentation by dynamic region growth and multiresolution merging.

Image segmentation is a fundamental task in many computer vision applications. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised color image segmentation algorithm, which exploits the information obtained from detecting edges in color images in the CIE L *a *b * color space. To this effect, by using a color gradient detection technique, pixels without edges are clustered and labeled individually to identify some initial portion of the input image content. Elements that contain higher gradient densities are included by the dynamic generation of clusters as the algorithm progresses. Texture modeling is performed by color quantization and local entropy computation of the quantized image. The obtained texture and color information along with a region growth map consisting of all fully grown regions are used to perform a unique multiresolution merging procedure to blend regions with similar characteristics. Experimental results obtained in comparison to published segmentation techniques demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed method.