• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.75-81
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• 2010

The segmentation of cartilage is crucial for the diagnose and treatment of osteoarthritis (OA), and has mostly been done manually by an expert, requiring a considerable amount of time and effort due to the thin shape and vague boundaries of the cartilage in MR (magnetic resonance) images. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic method to segment cartilage in a knee joint on MR images. The proposed method is based on a small number of manually segmented images as the training set and comprised of an initial per patch segmentation process and a global refinement process on the cumulative per patch results. Each patch for per patch segmentation is positioned by classifying the bone-cartilage interface on the pre-segmented bone surface. Next, the shape and intensity priors are constructed for each patch based on information extracted from reference patches in the training set. The ratio of influence between the shape and intensity priors is adaptively determined per patch. Each patch is segmented by graph cuts, where energy is defined based on constructed priors. Finally, global refinement is conducted on the global cartilage using the results of per patch segmentation as the shape prior. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed framework provide accurate and clinically useful segmentation results.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.590-599
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• 2018

Multivariate finite mixture model is becoming more and more popular in image processing. Performing image denoising from image patches to the whole image has been widely studied and applied. However, there remains a problem that the structure information is always ignored when transforming the patch into the vector form. In this paper, we study the operator which extracts patches from image and then transforms them to the vector form. Then, we find that some pixels which should be continuous in the image patches are discontinuous in the vector. Due to the poor anti-noise and the loss of structure information, we propose a new operator which may keep more information when extracting image patches. We compare the new operator with the old one by performing image denoising in Expected Patch Log Likelihood (EPLL) method, and we obtain better results in both visual effect and the value of PSNR.