• 대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지
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• 제29권5호
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• pp.348-354
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• 2008

Segmenting vessels in lower extremity CT images is very difficult because of gray level variation, connection to bones, and their small sizes. Instead of segmenting vessels, we propose an approach that segments bones and subtracts them from the original CT images. The subtracted images can contain not only connected vessel structures but also isolated vessels, which are very difficult to detect using conventional vessel segmentation methods. The proposed method initially grows a 3-dimensional (3D) volume with a seeded region growing (SRG) using an adaptive threshold and then detects junctions and forked branches. The forked branches are classified into either bone branches or vessel branches based on appearance, shape, size change, and moving velocity of the branch. The final volume is re-grown by collecting connected bone branches. The algorithm has produced promising results for segmenting bone structures in several tens of vessel-enhanced CT image data sets of lower extremities.

• International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems
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• 제4권5호
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• pp.660-667
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• 2006

This paper presents a novel region-based snake method for vessel segmentation. According to geometric shape analysis of the vessel structure with different scale, an efficient statistical estimation of vessel branches is introduced into the energy objective function, which applies not only the vessel intensity information, but also geometric information of line-like structure in the image. The defined energy function is minimized using the gradient descent method and a new region-based speed function is obtained, which is more accurate to the vessel structure and not sensitive to the initial condition. The narrow band algorithm in the level set framework implements the proposed method, the solution of which is steady. The segmentation experiments are shown on several images. Compared with other geometric active contour models, the proposed method is more efficient and robust.

• 전기전자학회논문지
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• 제23권2호
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• pp.557-570
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• 2019

In this study, a novel hierarchical approach is investigated to extract coronary vessel from X-ray angiogram. First, we propose to combine Decimation-free Directional Filter Bank (DDFB) and Homographic Filtering (HF) in order to enhance X-ray coronary angiographic image for segmentation purposes. Because the blood vessel ensures that blood flows in only one direction on vessel branch, the DDFB filter is suitable to be used to enhance the vessels at different orientations and radius. In the combination with HF filter, our method can simultaneously normalize the brightness across the image and increases contrast. Next, a coarse-to-fine strategy for iterative segmentation based on Otsu algorithm is applied to extract the main coronary vessels in different sizes. Furthermore, we also propose a new approach to segment very small vessels. Specifically, based on information of the main extracted vessels, we introduce a new method to extract junctions on the vascular tree and level of nodes on the tree. Then, the window based segmentation is applied to locate and extract the small vessels. Experimental results on our coronary X-ray angiography dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach can outperform standard method and attain the accuracy of 71.34%.

• Journal of International Society for Simulation Surgery
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• 제2권2호
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• pp.67-70
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• 2015

We propose an automatic vessel segmentation method of vertebral arteries in CT angiography using combined circular and cylindrical model fitting. First, to generate multi-segmented volumes, whole volume is automatically divided into four segments by anatomical properties of bone structures along z-axis of head and neck. To define an optimal volume circumscribing vertebral arteries, anterior-posterior bounding and side boundaries are defined as initial extracted vessel region. Second, the initial vessel candidates are tracked using circular model fitting. Since boundaries of the vertebral arteries are ambiguous in case the arteries pass through the transverse foramen in the cervical vertebra, the circle model is extended along z-axis to cylinder model for considering additional vessel information of neighboring slices. Finally, the boundaries of the vertebral arteries are detected using graph-cut optimization. From the experiments, the proposed method provides accurate results without bone artifacts and eroded vessels in the cervical vertebra.

• Journal of International Society for Simulation Surgery
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.17-25
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• 2015

Purpose In this paper, we propose a robust 3D vessel tracking algorithm by utilizing an active contour model and unscented Kalman filter which are the two representative algorithms on segmentation and tracking. Materials and Methods The proposed algorithm firstly accepts user input to produce an initial estimate of vessel boundary segmentation. On each Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) slice, the active contour is applied to segment the vessel boundary. After that, the estimation process of the unscented Kalman filter is applied to track the vessel boundary of the current slice to estimate the inter-slice vessel position translation and shape deformation. Finally both active contour and unscented Kalman filter are inter-operated for vessel segmentation of the next slice. Results The arbitrarily shaped blood vessel boundary on each slice is segmented by using the active contour model, and the Kalman filter is employed to track the translation and shape deformation between CTA slices. The proposed algorithm is applied to the 3D visualization of chest CTA images using graphics hardware. Conclusion Through this algorithm, more opportunities, giving quick and brief diagnosis, could be provided for the radiologist before detailed diagnosis using 2D CTA slices, Also, for the surgeon, the algorithm could be used for surgical planning, simulation, navigation and rehearsal, and is expected to be applied to highly valuable applications for more accurate 3D vessel tracking and rendering.

• 한국정보처리학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국정보처리학회 2009년도 추계학술발표대회
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• pp.345-346
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• 2009

The segmentation of vessel including portal vein, hepatic vein and artery, from Computed Tomography (CT) images plays an important role in the therapeutic strategies for hepatic diseases. Representing segmented vessels in three dimensional spaces is extremely useful for doctors to plan liver surgery. In this paper, proposed method is focused on smoothing technique of segmented 3D liver vessels, which derived from 3D region growing approach. A pixel expand algorithm has been developed first to avoid vessel lose and disconnection cased by the next smoothing technique. And then a binary volume filtering technique has been implemented and applied to make the segmented binary vessel volume qualitatively smoother. This strategy uses an iterative relaxation process to extract isosurfaces from binary volumes while retaining anatomical structure and important features in the volume. Hard and irregular place in volume image has been eliminated as shown in the result part, which also demonstrated that proposed method is a suitable smoothing solution for post processing of fine vessel segmentation.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제18권1호
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• pp.15-29
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• 2024

A fetoscope is an optical endoscope, which is often applied in fetoscopic laser photocoagulation to treat twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. In an operation, the clinician needs to observe the abnormal placental vessels through the endoscope, so as to guide the operation. However, low-quality imaging and narrow field of view of the fetoscope increase the difficulty of the operation. Introducing an accurate placental vessel segmentation of fetoscopic images can assist the fetoscopic laser photocoagulation and help identify the abnormal vessels. This study proposes a method to solve the above problems. A novel encoder-decoder network with a dual-path structure is proposed to segment the placental vessels in fetoscopic images. In particular, we introduce a channel attention mechanism and a continuous convolution structure to obtain multi-scale features with their weights. Moreover, a switching connection is inserted between the corresponding blocks of the two paths to strengthen their relationship. According to the results of a set of blood vessel segmentation experiments conducted on a public fetoscopic image dataset, our method has achieved higher scores than the current mainstream segmentation methods, raising the dice similarity coefficient, intersection over union, and pixel accuracy by 5.80%, 8.39% and 0.62%, respectively.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• 제8권2호
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• pp.119-128
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• 2014

The appearance of retinal blood vessels is an important diagnostic indicator of serious disease, such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. Automatic segmentation of the retinal vasculature is a primary step towards automatic assessment of the retinal blood vessel features. This paper presents an automated method for the enhancement and segmentation of blood vessels in fundus images. To decrease the influence of the optic disk, and emphasize the vessels for each retinal image, a multidirectional morphological top-hat transform with rotating structuring elements is first applied to the background homogenized retinal image. Then, an improved multiscale line detector is presented to produce a vessel response image, and yield the retinal blood vessel tree for each retinal image. Since different line detectors at varying scales have different line responses in the multiscale detector, the line detectors with longer length produce more vessel responses than the ones with shorter length; the improved multiscale detector combines all the responses at different scales by setting different weights for each scale. The methodology is evaluated on two publicly available databases, DRIVE and STARE. Experimental results demonstrate an excellent performance that approximates the average accuracy of a human observer. Moreover, the method is simple, fast, and robust to noise, so it is suitable for being integrated into a computer-assisted diagnostic system for ophthalmic disorders.

• 대한의용생체공학회:의공학회지
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• 제36권4호
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• pp.79-85
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• 2015

The purpose of this study is to develop an automatic algorithm for vessel segmentation in X-Ray angiogram using Random Forest (RF). The proposed algorithm is composed of the following steps: First, the multiscale hessian-based filtering is performed in order to enhance the vessel structure. Second, eigenvalues and eigenvectors of hessian matrix are used to learn the RF classifier as feature vectors. Finally, we can get the result through the trained RF. We evaluated the similarity between the result of proposed algorithm and the manual segmentation using 349 frames, and compared with the results of the following two methods: Frangi et al. and Krissian et al. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm showed high similarity compared to other two methods.

• 전기전자학회논문지
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• 제24권2호
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• pp.661-664
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• 2020

본 논문에서 우리는 선박의 이동 경로를 예측하기 위하여, 해상 영역을 분할하고, 분할된 영역을 기반으로 선박의 목적지를 예측하는 방법을 제안한다. 해상 영역을 분할하기 위하여 과거 이동 경로를 토대로 생성된 목적지 후보들을 군집화한다. 그리고, 선박이 이동할 목적지 영역을 예측하기 위해서 현재 위치에서 주어진 경로의 선형 여부와 향후 예측 시간에 따른 불확실성에 따라 다른 예측 방법을 적용한다. 예측에 사용하는 방법에는 선형 영역에서는 등속 운동을 가정한 선형 예측 방법, 불확실성이 높은 비선형 영역에서는 과거 경로 중 유사한 경로와 비슷한 움직임을 보일 것이라고 가정한 유사 경로 이용 예측 방법을 사용한다. 실험 결과에서 해당 방법이 선형 예측, 유사 경로 이용 예측 방법을 단독으로 적용하는 것에 비해 더 우수함을 보인다.