A bintree energy approach for colour image segmentation using adaptive channel selection

A new hierarchical approach called bintree energy segmentation was presented for color image segmentation. The image features are extracted by adaptive clustering on multi-channel data at each level and used as the criteria to dynamically select the best chromatic channel, where the segmentation is carried out. In this approach, an extended direct energy computation method based on the Chan-Vese model was proposed to segment the selected channel, and the segmentation outputs are then fused with other channels into new images, from which a new channel with better features is selected for the second round segmentation. This procedure is repeated until the preset condition is met. Finally, a binary segmentation tree is formed, in which each leaf represents a class of objects with a distinctive color. To facilitate the data organization, image background is employed in segmentation and channels fusion. The bintree energy segmentation exploits color information involved in all channels data and tries to optimize the global segmentation result by choosing the ＂best＂ channel for segmentation at each level. The experiments show that the method is effective in speed, accuracy and flexibility.     

A two-step outlier removal procedure for surface reconstruction

Outliers in point clouds affect the performance of surface reconstruction directly. Most of outlier removal methods just remove those outliers far away from the real surface and are only applied to handle watertight surface. In this paper, a two-step outlier removal procedure is proposed to filter the point clouds acquired from the gray code and line-shifting technique. The first step is to remove the outliers far away from the real surface. Some feature points are extracted from the point clouds to construct an initial surface. The points with distances to the initial surface greater than a given threshold are removed as distant outliers. The retained points are linked into lines in each structured light sheet using their Voronoi diagrams. Some of lines which are very close to the real surface are removed as near outliers in the second step. The experimental results show that the proposed method is very effective in removing outliers for surface reconstruction. Foundation item: the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30470488)     

Multi-element ultrasound phased array applicator for the ablation of deep-seated tissue

High-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) has attracted increasing interests as a promising noninvasive modality for the treatment of deep tumors in the thoracic and abdominal cavity. A 90-element HIFU spherical phased array applicator operated at 1MHz has been developed for deep tissue ablation. The spherical array with a 5 cm wide central hole has a 21 cm diameter and an 18 cm radius of curvature. Annular element distribution with unequal element spacing is used to reduce the number of elements. The array is constructed with piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT-8) circular elements that are 1.4 cm in diameter and have a wall with thickness of 0.2 cm. The array offers an effective ablating depth of at least 8 cm in the tissue for both simulations and ex vivo experiments. The simulations demonstrate that the developed array can steer the focus with good quality of intensity distributions up to 6mm off center over ranges from 17 to 21 cm when the water depth is set at 11 cm. We also present the beam focusing capability in deep tissue through a series of ex vivo experiments by measuring discoloration areas after sonications. These results indicate that the developed array is ideal for the ablation of deep-seated tissue.     

A New Full Bridge High Intensity Focused Ultrasound Power System with Harmonic Cancellation

The feasibility of a new full bridge high intensity focused ultrasound(HIFU) amplifier system with harmonic cancellation is evaluated in this study. Harmonic cancellation technique is applied to these power amplifiers, which can eliminate the 3rd harmonic and all even harmonics. Since this technique requires two channels of phase signal to control one channel of power amplifier, the signal generator is required to double its output. The transducer array proposed in this study has 100 elements. So we choose an FPGA chip to generate 200 driving signals, and each channel has a phase resolution of 2ns, less than 1°. The phase signal from the FPGA meets the requirement of driving the power amplifiers. The output waveform of one channel of power amplifier(voltage across the transducer) is evaluated, and shows fewer harmonic components.     

DIRECT VOXEL-PROJECTION FOR VOLUMETRIC DATA RENDERING IN MEDICAL IMAGERY

IntroductionWith the development of medical imagingtechniques,many devices such as computed tomo-graphy,positron emission tomography,singlephoton emissioin computed tomography,magneticresonance imaging,and ultrasound scanners arewidely available for capturing the planar images ofhuman organs directly in machine- readable form.These medical imaging methods bring a lot of ad-vantages to clinical diagnosis and treatment.How-ever,due to these systems'2 - D imaging modali-ties,it is difficult to un…     

Calibration for 3D Structured Light Measurement

A calibration procedure was developed for three-dimensional(3D) binocular structured light measurement systems. In virtue of a specially designed pattern, matching points in stereo images are extracted. And then sufficient 3D space points are obtained through pairs of images with the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of each camera estimated prior and consequently some lights are calibrated by means of multi point fitting. Finally, a mathematical model is applied to interpolate and approximate all dynamic scanning lights based on geometry. The process of calibration method is successfully used in the binocular 3D measurement system based on structured lights and the 3D reconstruction results are satisfying.     

Monitoring Thermal Coagulation with Ultrasonic Textures

The feasibility of using B-mode ultrasound image textures and pattern recognition technique to characterize the thermal coagulation in vitro during radiofrequency ablation was investigated. The changes of ultrasonic textures in the different regions of samples varied with the heating time in the in-vitro experiments, which would result in that the coagulated and noncoagulated regions of tissue had different ultrasonic textures. Using support vector machine to extract the ultrasonic texture features and characterize the state of tissue, the size and boundaries of thermal lesions could be detected and measured more exactly than only using the gray scale information of B-mode ultrasound image. The proposed method would be applied to the image-guided radiofrequency ablation (IGRA) procedure for monitoring the thermal coagulation.     

Speckle reduction based on contourlet transform using scale adaptive threshold for medical ultrasound image

A new speckle suppression method in contourlet domain was presented. By modeling the subband contourlet coefficients of the ultrasound images after logarithmic transform as generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD), we gave a scale-adaptive threshold in Bayesian framework. Experimental results of both synthetic and clinical ultrasound images show that our method has a better performance on speckle suppressing than the wavelet-based method while well preserving the feature details.     

Surface reconstruction by structured light projection

A rapid and practical method is proposed to reconstruct surface based on the linked structured light stripes which are produced by structured light projection. The subpixel points on a stripe are linked firstly one by one to form a stripe ensemble which is then transformed to a point ensemble in 3D space. The initial mesh with local optimization is generated by triangulating each two adjacent point ensembles. In order to obtain a better mesh, our improved edge flipping algorithm is employed to optimize the initial mesh globally. Because of employing the information of the linked structured stripes, our reconstruction algorithm is performed fastly. Moreover, the subpixel points on each stripe are already linked on the captured images such that they do not require the high sampling density. The experiments show that the proposed method constructs a surface rapidly and effectively.