• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.82-88
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• 2017

Enlargement of the lateral ventricles have been identified as a surrogate marker of neurological disorders. Quantitative measure of the lateral ventricle from MRI would enable earlier and more accurate clinical diagnosis in monitoring disease progression. Even though it requires an automated or semi-automated segmentation method for objective quantification, it is difficult to define lateral ventricles due to insufficient contrast and brightness of structural imaging. In this study, we proposed a fully automated lateral ventricle segmentation method based on a graph cuts algorithm combined with atlas-based segmentation and connected component labeling. Initially, initial seeds for graph cuts were defined by atlas-based segmentation (ATS). They were adjusted by partial volume images in order to provide accurate a priori information on graph cuts. A graph cuts algorithm is to finds a global minimum of energy with minimum cut/maximum flow algorithm function on graph. In addition, connected component labeling used to remove false ventricle regions. The proposed method was validated with the well-known tools using the dice similarity index, recall and precision values. The proposed method was significantly higher dice similarity index ($0.860{\pm}0.036$, p < 0.001) and recall ($0.833{\pm}0.037$, p < 0.001) compared with other tools. Therefore, the proposed method yielded a robust and reliable segmentation result.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.315-325
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• 2014

Concrete is an important material in most of civil constructions. Many properties of concrete can be determined through analysis of concrete images. Image segmentation is the first step for the most of these analyses. An automated system for segmentation of concrete images into microstructures using texture analysis is proposed. The performance of five different classifiers has been evaluated and the results show that using an Artificial Neural Network classifier is the best choice for an automatic image segmentation of concrete.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.660-669
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• 2020

Objective: To evaluate the accuracy of a deep learning-based automated segmentation of the left ventricle (LV) myocardium using cardiac CT. Materials and Methods: To develop a fully automated algorithm, 100 subjects with coronary artery disease were randomly selected as a development set (50 training / 20 validation / 30 internal test). An experienced cardiac radiologist generated the manual segmentation of the development set. The trained model was evaluated using 1000 validation set generated by an experienced technician. Visual assessment was performed to compare the manual and automatic segmentations. In a quantitative analysis, sensitivity and specificity were calculated according to the number of pixels where two three-dimensional masks of the manual and deep learning segmentations overlapped. Similarity indices, such as the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), were used to evaluate the margin of each segmented masks. Results: The sensitivity and specificity of automated segmentation for each segment (1-16 segments) were high (85.5-100.0%). The DSC was 88.3 ± 6.2%. Among randomly selected 100 cases, all manual segmentation and deep learning masks for visual analysis were classified as very accurate to mostly accurate and there were no inaccurate cases (manual vs. deep learning: very accurate, 31 vs. 53; accurate, 64 vs. 39; mostly accurate, 15 vs. 8). The number of very accurate cases for deep learning masks was greater than that for manually segmented masks. Conclusion: We present deep learning-based automatic segmentation of the LV myocardium and the results are comparable to manual segmentation data with high sensitivity, specificity, and high similarity scores.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.525-527
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• 2003

Recently, the spatial resolution of earth observation satellites is significantly increased to a few meters. Such high spatial resolution images definitely will provide lots of information for detail-thirsty remote sensing users. However, it is more difficult to develop automated image algorithms for automated image feature extraction and pattern recognition. In this study, we propose a two-stage procedure to extract road information from high resolution satellite images. At first stage, a watershed segmentation technique is developed to classify the image into various regions. Then, a knowledge is built for road and used to extract the road regions. In this study, we use panchromatic and multi-spectral images of the IKONOS satellite as test dataset. The experiment result shows that the proposed technique can generate suitable and meaningful road objects from high spatial resolution satellite images. Apparently, misclassified regions such as parking lots are recognized as road needed further refinement in future research.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.294-304
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• 2023

Objective: We aimed to investigate whether image standardization using deep learning-based computed tomography (CT) image conversion would improve the performance of deep learning-based automated hepatic segmentation across various reconstruction methods. Materials and Methods: We collected contrast-enhanced dual-energy CT of the abdomen that was obtained using various reconstruction methods, including filtered back projection, iterative reconstruction, optimum contrast, and monoenergetic images with 40, 60, and 80 keV. A deep learning based image conversion algorithm was developed to standardize the CT images using 142 CT examinations (128 for training and 14 for tuning). A separate set of 43 CT examinations from 42 patients (mean age, 10.1 years) was used as the test data. A commercial software program (MEDIP PRO v2.0.0.0, MEDICALIP Co. Ltd.) based on 2D U-NET was used to create liver segmentation masks with liver volume. The original 80 keV images were used as the ground truth. We used the paired t-test to compare the segmentation performance in the Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and difference ratio of the liver volume relative to the ground truth volume before and after image standardization. The concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was used to assess the agreement between the segmented liver volume and ground-truth volume. Results: The original CT images showed variable and poor segmentation performances. The standardized images achieved significantly higher DSCs for liver segmentation than the original images (DSC [original, 5.40%-91.27%] vs. [standardized, 93.16%-96.74%], all P < 0.001). The difference ratio of liver volume also decreased significantly after image conversion (original, 9.84%-91.37% vs. standardized, 1.99%-4.41%). In all protocols, CCCs improved after image conversion (original, -0.006-0.964 vs. standardized, 0.990-0.998). Conclusion: Deep learning-based CT image standardization can improve the performance of automated hepatic segmentation using CT images reconstructed using various methods. Deep learning-based CT image conversion may have the potential to improve the generalizability of the segmentation network.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.449-463
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• 2024

Automated crack detection is crucial for structural health monitoring and post-earthquake rapid damage detection. However, realizing high precision automatic crack detection in the absence of corresponding manual labeling presents a formidable challenge. This paper presents a novel crack segmentation transfer learning method and a novel crack segmentation model called Swin-CrackFormer. The proposed method facilitates efficient crack image style transfer through a meticulously designed data preprocessing technique, followed by the utilization of a GAN model for image style transfer. Moreover, the proposed Swin-CrackFormer combines the advantages of Transformer and convolution operations to achieve effective local and global feature extraction. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, this study validates the proposed method on three unlabeled crack datasets and evaluates the Swin-CrackFormer model on the METU dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the crack transfer learning method significantly improves the crack segmentation performance on unlabeled crack datasets. Moreover, the Swin-CrackFormer model achieved the best detection result on the METU dataset, surpassing existing crack segmentation models.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.436-442
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• 2017

A novel method of Skin lesion segmentation based on the combination of Texture and Neural Network is proposed in this paper. This paper combines the textures of different pixels in the skin images in order to increase the performance of lesion segmentation. For segmenting skin lesions, a two-step process is done. First, automatic border detection is performed to separate the lesion from the background skin. This begins by identifying the features that represent the lesion border clearly by the process of Texture analysis. In the second step, the obtained features are given as input towards the Recurrent Echo state neural networks in order to obtain the segmented skin lesion region. The proposed algorithm is trained and tested for 862 skin lesion images in order to evaluate the accuracy of segmentation. Overall accuracy of the proposed method is compared with existing algorithms. An average accuracy of 98.8% for segmenting skin lesion images has been obtained.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.407-412
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• 2005

Convenience is one of the most important factors in medical image segmentation. Convenience is defined by compiling opinions from radiologists, and can be described as controllable maximum automation on the condition of producing only accurate results. The components of convenience are inclusive automation and inclusive modification. Inclusive modification consists of verify-and-confirm, undo-redo, exchange of segmentation methods, and intelligent modification tools. Inclusive automation is composed of automatic selection of a method, automatic selection of a confident segment, and automated chores. The convenient segmentation tool has been developed to segment X-ray images for orthopedic surgery, and has received an excellent evaluation from radiologists.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.383-392
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• 2023

Post-earthquake building condition assessment is crucial for subsequent rescue and remediation and can be automated by emerging computer vision and deep learning technologies. This study is based on an endeavour for the 2nd International Competition of Structural Health Monitoring (IC-SHM 2021). The task package includes five image segmentation objectives - defects (crack/spall/rebar exposure), structural component, and damage state. The structural component and damage state tasks are identified as the priority that can form actionable decisions. A multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed to conduct the two major tasks simultaneously. The rest 3 sub-tasks (spall/crack/rebar exposure) were incorporated as auxiliary tasks. By synchronously learning defect information (spall/crack/rebar exposure), the multi-task CNN model outperforms the counterpart single-task models in recognizing structural components and estimating damage states. Particularly, the pixel-level damage state estimation witnesses a mIoU (mean intersection over union) improvement from 0.5855 to 0.6374. For the defect detection tasks, rebar exposure is omitted due to the extremely biased sample distribution. The segmentations of crack and spall are automated by single-task U-Net but with extra efforts to resample the provided data. The segmentation of small objects (spall and crack) benefits from the resampling method, with a substantial IoU increment of nearly 10%.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.204-214
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• 2012

This paper proposes an image segmentation for a vision-based automated defect inspection system on surface image of TFT-LCD(Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display) panels. TFT-LCD images have non-uniform brightness, which is hard to finding defective regions. Although there are several methods or proposed algorithms, it is difficult to divide the defect with high reliability because of non-uniform properties in the image. Kamel and Zhao disclosed a method which based on logical stage algorithm for segmentation of graphics and character. This method is a one of the local segmentation method that has a advantage. It is that characters and graphics are well segmented in an image which has non-uniform property. As TFT-LCD panel image has a same property, so this paper proposes new algorithm to segment regions of defects based on Kamel and Zhao's algorithm. Our algorithm has an advantage that there are a few ghost objects around the defects. We had experiments to prove performance in real TFT-LCD panel images, and comparing with the FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) method which is used a bandpass filter.