François Chung, Ph.D.

Publication

François Chung; Regional appearance modeling for deformable model-based image segmentation; Doctoral thesis (Ph.D. Thesis), Mines ParisTech, Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées, 2011.

Abstract

This thesis presents a novel appearance prior for model-based image segmentation. This appearance prior, denoted as Multimodal Prior Appearance Model (MPAM), is built upon an Expectation-Maximization (EM) clustering of intensity profiles with model order selection to automatically select the number of profile classes. Unlike classical approaches based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the clustering is considered as regional because intensity profiles are classified for each mesh and not for each vertex.

First, we explain how to build a MPAM from a training set of meshes and images. The clustering of intensity profiles and the determination of the number of appearance regions by a novel model order selection criterion are explained. A spatial regularization approach to spatially smooth the clustering of profiles is presented and the projection of the appearance information from each dataset on a reference mesh is described.

Second, we present a boosted clustering based on spectral clustering, which optimizes the clustering of profiles for segmentation purposes. The representation of the similarity between data points in the spectral space is explained. Comparative results on liver profiles from Computed Tomography (CT) images show that our approach outperforms PCA-based appearance models.

Finally, we present methods for the analysis of lower limb structures from Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. In a first part, our technique to create subject-specific models for kinematic simulations of lower limbs is described. In a second part, the performance of statistical models is compared in the context of lower limb bones segmentation when only a small number of datasets is available for training.

Keywords

• appearance modeling
• liver
• lower limbs
• medical imaging
• model-based image segmentation
• unsupervised clustering

References