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Automatic shape anomaly detection in large-scale imaging data can be useful for screening suboptimal segmentations and pathologies altering the cardiac morphology without intensive manual labour. We propose a deep probabilistic model for local anomaly detection in sequences of heart shapes, modelled as point sets, in a cardiac cycle. A deep recurrent encoder-decoder network captures the spatio-temporal dependencies to predict the next shape in the cycle and thus derive the outlier points that are attributed to excessive deviations from the network prediction. A predictive mixture distribution models the inlier and outlier classes via Gaussian and uniform distributions, respectively. A Gibbs sampling Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm computes soft anomaly scores of the points via the posterior probabilities of each class in the E-step and estimates the parameters of the network and the predictive distribution in the M-step. We demonstrate the versatility of the method using two shape datasets derived from: (i) one million biventricular CMR images from 20,000 participants in the UK Biobank (UKB), and (ii) routine diagnostic imaging from Multi-Centre, Multi-Vendor, and Multi-Disease Cardiac Image (M&Ms). Experiments show that the detected shape anomalies in the UKB dataset are mostly associated with poor segmentation quality, and the predicted shape sequences show significant improvement over the input sequences. Furthermore, evaluations on U-Net based shapes from the M&Ms dataset reveals that the anomalies are attributable to the underlying pathologies that affect the ventricles. The proposed model can therefore be used as an effective mechanism to sift shape anomalies in large-scale cardiac imaging pipelines for further analysis., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier B.V.)

A probabilistic group-wise similarity registration technique based on Student's t-mixture model (TMM) and a multi-resolution extension of the same (mr-TMM) are proposed in this study, to robustly align shapes and establish valid correspondences, for the purpose of training statistical shape models (SSMs). Shape analysis across large cohorts requires automatic generation of the requisite training sets. Automated segmentation and landmarking of medical images often result in shapes with varying proportions of outliers and consequently require a robust method of alignment and correspondence estimation. Both TMM and mrTMM are validated by comparison with state-of-the-art registration algorithms based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), using both synthetic and clinical data. Four clinical data sets are used for validation: (a) 2D femoral heads (K= 1000 samples generated from DXA images of healthy subjects); (b) control-hippocampi (K= 50 samples generated from T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images of healthy subjects); (c) MCI-hippocampi (K= 28 samples generated from MR images of patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment); and (d) heart shapes comprising left and right ventricular endocardium and epicardium (K= 30 samples generated from short-axis MR images of: 10 healthy subjects, 10 patients diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and 10 diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy). The proposed methods significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art in terms of registration accuracy in the experiments involving synthetic data, with mrTMM offering significant improvement over TMM. With the clinical data, both methods performed comparably to the state-of-the-art for the hippocampi and heart data sets, which contained few outliers. They outperformed the state-of-the-art for the femur data set, containing large proportions of outliers, in terms of alignment accuracy, and the quality of SSMs trained, quantified in terms of generalization, compactness and specificity., (Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Background and Objective: Retinal vascular tree extraction plays an important role in computer-aided diagnosis and surgical operations. Junction point detection and classification provide useful information about the structure of the vascular network, facilitating objective analysis of retinal diseases., Methods: In this study, we present a new machine learning algorithm for joint classification and tracking of retinal blood vessels. Our method is based on a hierarchical probabilistic framework, where the local intensity cross sections are classified as either junction or vessel points. Gaussian basis functions are used for intensity interpolation, and the corresponding linear coefficients are assumed to be samples from class-specific Gamma distributions. Hence, a directed Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) is proposed and the hyperparameters are estimated using a Maximum Likelihood (ML) solution based on Laplace approximation., Results: The performance of proposed method is evaluated using precision and recall rates on the REVIEW database. Our experiments show the proposed approach reaches promising results in bifurcation point detection and classification, achieving 88.67% precision and 88.67% recall rates., Conclusions: This technique results in a classifier with high precision and recall when comparing it with Xu's method., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop a novel technique for lung nodule detection using an optimized feature set. This feature set has been achieved after rigorous experimentation, which has helped in reducing the false positives significantly., Method: The proposed method starts with preprocessing, removing any present noise from input images, followed by lung segmentation using optimal thresholding. Then the image is enhanced using multiscale dot enhancement filtering prior to nodule detection and feature extraction. Finally, classification of lung nodules is achieved using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The feature set consists of intensity, shape (2D and 3D) and texture features, which have been selected to optimize the sensitivity and reduce false positives. In addition to SVM, some other supervised classifiers like K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) have also been used for performance comparison. The extracted features have also been compared class-wise to determine the most relevant features for lung nodule detection. The proposed system has been evaluated using 850 scans from Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) dataset and k-fold cross-validation scheme., Results: The overall sensitivity has been improved compared to the previous methods and false positives per scan have been reduced significantly. The achieved sensitivities at detection and classification stages are 94.20% and 98.15%, respectively, with only 2.19 false positives per scan., Conclusions: It is very difficult to achieve high performance metrics using only a single feature class therefore hybrid approach in feature selection remains a better choice. Choosing right set of features can improve the overall accuracy of the system by improving the sensitivity and reducing false positives., (© 2017 American Association of Physicists in Medicine.)

Despite continuous progress in X-ray angiography systems, X-ray coronary angiography is fundamentally limited by its 2D representation of moving coronary arterial trees, which can negatively impact assessment of coronary artery disease and guidance of percutaneous coronary intervention. To provide clinicians with 3D/3D+time information of coronary arteries, methods computing reconstructions of coronary arteries from X-ray angiography are required. Because of several aspects (e.g. cardiac and respiratory motion, type of X-ray system), reconstruction from X-ray coronary angiography has led to vast amount of research and it still remains as a challenging and dynamic research area. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art approaches on reconstruction of high-contrast coronary arteries from X-ray angiography. We mainly focus on the theoretical features in model-based (modelling) and tomographic reconstruction of coronary arteries, and discuss the evaluation strategies. We also discuss the potential role of reconstructions in clinical decision making and interventional guidance, and highlight areas for future research., (Crown Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Construction of Statistical Shape Models (SSMs) from arbitrary point sets is a challenging problem due to significant shape variation and lack of explicit point correspondence across the training data set. In medical imaging, point sets can generally represent different shape classes that span healthy and pathological exemplars. In such cases, the constructed SSM may not generalize well, largely because the probability density function (pdf) of the point sets deviates from the underlying assumption of Gaussian statistics. To this end, we propose a generative model for unsupervised learning of the pdf of point sets as a mixture of distinctive classes. A Variational Bayesian (VB) method is proposed for making joint inferences on the labels of point sets, and the principal modes of variations in each cluster. The method provides a flexible framework to handle point sets with no explicit point-to-point correspondences. We also show that by maximizing the marginalized likelihood of the model, the optimal number of clusters of point sets can be determined. We illustrate this work in the context of understanding the anatomical phenotype of the left and right ventricles in heart. To this end, we use a database containing hearts of healthy subjects, patients with Pulmonary Hypertension (PH), and patients with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). We demonstrate that our method can outperform traditional PCA in both generalization and specificity measures.

We present a generative approach for simultaneously registering a probabilistic atlas of a healthy population to brain magnetic resonance (MR) scans showing glioma and segmenting the scans into tumor as well as healthy tissue labels. The proposed method is based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm that incorporates a glioma growth model for atlas seeding, a process which modifies the original atlas into one with tumor and edema adapted to best match a given set of patient's images. The modified atlas is registered into the patient space and utilized for estimating the posterior probabilities of various tissue labels. EM iteratively refines the estimates of the posterior probabilities of tissue labels, the deformation field and the tumor growth model parameters. Hence, in addition to segmentation, the proposed method results in atlas registration and a low-dimensional description of the patient scans through estimation of tumor model parameters. We validate the method by automatically segmenting 10 MR scans and comparing the results to those produced by clinical experts and two state-of-the-art methods. The resulting segmentations of tumor and edema outperform the results of the reference methods, and achieve a similar accuracy from a second human rater. We additionally apply the method to 122 patients scans and report the estimated tumor model parameters and their relations with segmentation and registration results. Based on the results from this patient population, we construct a statistical atlas of the glioma by inverting the estimated deformation fields to warp the tumor segmentations of patients scans into a common space.

Geometric flux maximizing flow (FLUX) is an active contour based method which evolves an initial surface to maximize the flux of a vector field on the surface. For blood vessel segmentation, the vector field is defined as the vectors specified by vascular edge strengths and orientations. Hence, the segmentation performance depends on the quality of the detected edge vector field. In this paper, we propose a new method for level set based segmentation of blood vessels by generalizing the FLUX on a Riemannian manifold (R-FLUX). We consider a 3D scalar image I(x) as a manifold embedded in the 4D space (x, I(x)) and compute the image metric by pullback from the 4D space, whose metric tensor depends on the vessel enhancing diffusion (VED) tensor. This allows us to devise a non-linear filter which both projects and normalizes the original image gradient vectors under the inverse of local VED tensors. The filtered gradient vectors pertaining to the vessels are less sensitive to the local image contrast and more coherent with the local vessel orientation. The method has been applied to both synthetic and real TOF MRA data sets. Comparisons are made with the FLUX and vesselsness response based segmentations, indicating that the R-FLUX outperforms both methods in terms of leakage minimization and thiner vessel delineation., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This paper investigates the problem of atlas registration of brain images with gliomas. Multiparametric imaging modalities (T1, T1-CE, T2, and FLAIR) are first utilized for segmentations of different tissues, and to compute the posterior probability map (PBM) of membership to each tissue class, using supervised learning. Similar maps are generated in the initially normal atlas, by modeling the tumor growth, using reaction-diffusion equation. Deformable registration using a demons-like algorithm is used to register the patient images with the tumor bearing atlas. Joint estimation of the simulated tumor parameters (e.g., location, mass effect and degree of infiltration), and the spatial transformation is achieved by maximization of the log-likelihood of observation. An expectation-maximization algorithm is used in registration process to estimate the spatial transformation and other parameters related to tumor simulation are optimized through asynchronous parallel pattern search (APPSPACK). The proposed method has been evaluated on five simulated data sets created by statistically simulated deformations (SSD), and fifteen real multichannel glioma data sets. The performance has been evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the results have been compared to ORBIT, an alternative method solving a similar problem. The results show that our method outperforms ORBIT, and the warped templates have better similarity to patient images.

In this paper, detection of edges in oriented fields is addressed. In some applications such as vessel segmentation because of the intrinsic orientation of the structures, edge detection is only demanded in a particular subspace. This is specially usefull when a curve evolution is chosen for segmentation since gradients in parallel to vessel orientation may stop the contour. An anisotropic edge detection scheme is generalized on a Riemannian manifold using the local structure tensor. The method is the generalization of the PLUS operator proposed for accurate curved edge detection. Examples are given and the comparison is made with the state-of-the-art flux maximizing flow which indicates that significant improvements in terms of leakage minimization and thiner vessel delineation is achievable using our methodology.

Evolutionary schemes based on the level set theory are effective tools for medical image segmentation. In this paper, a new variational technique for edge integration is presented. Region statistical measures and orientation information from ramp-like edges, are fused within an energy minimization scheme that is based on a new interpretation of edge concept. A region driven advection term simulating the edge strength effect is directly obtained from this minimization strategy. We have applied our method to several real Magnetic Resonance Angiography data sets and comparison has been made with a state-of-the-art vessel segmentation method. Presented results indicate that using this method a significant improvement is achievable and the method can be an effective tool to extract vessels in MRA intracranial images.