• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.103-111
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• 2016

Traditionally, in the hospital the doctors saw the TRUS images by their eyes and manually segmented the boundary between the prostate and nonprostate. But the manually segmenting process not only needed too much time but also had different boundaries according to the doctor. To cope the problems, some automatic segmentations of the prostate have been studied to generate the constant segmentation results and get the belief from patients. Besides, on detecting the boundary, the ones in the middle of all images are easy to find the boundary but the base and apex of the images are hard to do it since there are lots of uncertain boundary. Accurate detection of prostate boundaries is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noises and the short range of gray levels. In this paper, we propose the method that extracts a prostate boundary using features of its directions on prostate image. As a result of our experiments, it shows that the boundary never falls short of the existing methods or human expert's segmentation. And also, its searching speed is too fast because the method searches a smaller area that other methods.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.5
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• pp.187-194
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• 2014

Prostate cancer is a malignant tumor occurring in the prostate. Recently, the repetition rate is increasing. Image inspection method which we can check the prostate structure the most correctly is MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging), but it is hard to apply it to all the patients because of the cost. So, they use mostly TRUS(Transrectal Ultrasound) images acquired from prostate ultrasound inspection and which are cheap and easy to inspect the prostate in the process of treating and diagnosing the prostate cancer. Traditionally, in the hospital the doctors saw the TRUS images by their eyes and manually segmented the boundary between the prostate and nonprostate. But the manually segmenting process not only needed too much time but also had different boundaries according to the doctor. To cope the problems, some automatic segmentations of the prostate have been studied to generate the constant segmentation results and get the belief from patients. In this study, we propose an average shape model to segment the prostate boundary in TRUS prostate image. The method has 3 steps. First, it finds the probe using edge distribution. Next, it finds two straight lines connected with the probe. Finally it puts the shape model to the image using the position of the probe and straight lines.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.103-116
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• 2013

Prostate cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in men and is a major cause of mortality in the most of countries. In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease accurate detection of prostate boundaries in transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images is required. This is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using Gabor feature extraction and snake-like contour is presented. This method involves preprocessing, extracting Gabor feature, training, and prostate segmentation. The speckle reduction for preprocessing step has been achieved by using stick filter and top-hat transform has been implemented for smoothing the contour. A Gabor filter bank for extraction of rotation-invariant texture features has been implemented. A support vector machine(SVM) for training step has been used to get each feature of prostate and nonprostate. Finally, the boundary of prostate is extracted by the snake-like contour algorithm. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results showed that this new algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with less than 10.2% of the accuracy which is relative to boundary provided manually by experts.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.717-725
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• 2015

Prostate images have been used in the diagnosis of prostate using TRUS images being relatively cheap. Ultrasound images are recorded with 3 dimension and one diagnostic exam is made with a number of the images. A doctor can see 2 dimensional images on the monitor sequentially and 3 dimensional ones to diagnose a disease. To display the images, 2-d images are used with raw 2-d ones, but 3-d images need to be segmented by the prostates and their backgrounds to be seen from different angles and with cut images of inner side. Especially on detecting the boundary, the ones in the middle of all images are easy to find the boundary but the base and apex of the images are hard to do it since there are lots of uncertain boundary. So, in this paper we propose the method that applies an average shape model and detects the boundary, and shows its superiority compared to the existing methods with experiments.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.675-682
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• 2014

Prostate is only an organ of men. To diagnose the disease of the prostate, generally transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images are used. Detecting its boundary is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using Support Vector Machine(SVM) is presented. This method involves preprocessing, extracting Gabor feature, training, and prostate segmentation. The speckle reduction for preprocessing step has been achieved by using stick filter and top-hat transform has been implemented for smoothing. Gabor filter bank for extraction of rotation-invariant texture features has been implemented. SVM for training step has been used to get each feature of prostate and nonprostate. Finally, the boundary of prostate is extracted. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results shows that the proposed algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with less than 10% relative to boundary provided manually by doctors.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.603-611
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• 2016

Generally, the doctors manually delineated the prostate boundary seeing the image by their eyes, but the manual method not only needed quite much time but also had different boundaries depending on doctors. To reduce the effort like them the automatic delineating methods are needed, but detecting the boundary is hard to do since there are lots of uncertain textures or speckle noises. There have been studied in SVM, SIFT, Gabor texture filter, snake-like contour, and average-shape model methods. Besides, there were lots of studies about 2 and 3 dimension images and CT and MRI. But no studies have been developed superior to human experts and they need additional studies. For this, this paper proposes a method that delineates the boundary predicting its texture features and its average distribution on the prostate image. As result, we got the similar boundary as the method of human experts.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.17 no.12
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• pp.101-109
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• 2012

In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease accurate detection of prostate boundaries in transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images is required. This is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a method for automatic prostate segmentation inTRUS images using support vectors and snake-like contour is presented. This method involves preprocessing, extracting Gabor feature, training, and prostate segmentation. Gabor filter bank for extracting the texture features has been implemented. A support vector machine(SVM) for training step has been used to get each feature of prostate and nonprostate. The boundary of prostate is extracted by the snake-like contour algorithm. The results showed that this new algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with less than 9.3% relative to boundary provided manually by experts.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.187-194
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• 2012

Prostate cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in men and is a major cause of mortality in the most of countries. In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease, transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images are being used because the cost is low. But, accurate detection of prostate boundaries is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noises and the short range of gray levels. This paper proposes a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using its average shape model and invariant features. This approach consists of 4 steps. First, it detects the probe position and the two straight lines connected to the probe using edge distribution. Next, it acquires 3 prostate patches which are in the middle of average model. The patches will be used to compare the features of prostate and nonprostate. Next, it compares and classifies which blocks are similar to 3 representative patches. Last, the boundaries from prior classification and the rough boundaries from first step are used to determine the segmentation. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results showed that this new approach extracted the prostate boundary with less than 7.78% relative to boundary provided manually by experts.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.123-131
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• 2020

Purpose: Joint label fusion (JLF) is a popular multi-atlas-based segmentation algorithm, which compensates for dependent errors that may exist between atlases. However, in order to get good segmentation results, it is very important to set the several free parameters of the algorithm to optimal values. In this study, we first investigate the feasibility of a JLF algorithm for prostate segmentation in MR images, and then suggest the optimal set of parameters for the automatic prostate segmentation by validating the results of each parameter combination. Materials and Methods: We acquired T2-weighted prostate MR images from 20 normal heathy volunteers and did a series of cross validations for every set of parameters of JLF. In each case, the atlases were rigidly registered for the target image. Then, we calculated their voting weights for label fusion from each combination of JLF's parameters (r_pxy, r_pz, r_sxy, r_sz, β). We evaluated the segmentation performances by five validation metrics of the Prostate MR Image Segmentation challenge. Results: As the number of voxels participating in the voting weight calculation and the number of referenced atlases is increased, the overall segmentation performance is gradually improved. The JLF algorithm showed the best results for dice similarity coefficient, 0.8495 ± 0.0392; relative volume difference, 15.2353 ± 17.2350; absolute relative volume difference, 18.8710 ± 13.1546; 95% Hausdorff distance, 7.2366 ± 1.8502; and average boundary distance, 2.2107 ± 0.4972; in parameters of r_pxy = 10, r_pz = 1, r_sxy = 3, r_sz = 1, and β = 3. Conclusion: The evaluated results showed the feasibility of the JLF algorithm for automatic segmentation of prostate MRI. This empirical analysis of segmentation results by label fusion allows for the appropriate setting of parameters.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.695-699
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose an automatic prostate segmentation technique using image intensity and gradient information. Our method is composed of four steps. First, rays at regular intervals are generated. To minimize the effect of noise, the start and end positions of the ray are calculated. Second, the profiles on each ray are sorted based on the gradient. And priorities are applied to the sorted gradient in the profile. Third, boundary points are extracted by using gradient priority and intensity distribution. Finally, to reduce the error, the extracted boundary points are corrected by using B-spline interpolation. For accuracy evaluation, the average distance differences and overlapping region ratio between results of manual and automatic segmentations are calculated. As the experimental results, the average distance difference error and standard deviation were 1.09mm $\pm0.20mm$. And the overlapping region ratio was 92%.