An adaptive region growing algorithm for breast masses in mammograms

This study attempted to accurately segment the mammographic masses and distinguish malignant from benign tumors.An adaptive region growing algorithm with hybrid assessment function combined with maximum likelihood analysis and maximum gradient analysis was developed in this paper.In order to accommodate different situations of masses,the likelihood and the edge gradients of segmented masses were weighted adaptively by the use of information entropy.106 benign and 110 malignant tumors were included in this study.We found that the proposed algorithm obtained segmentation contour more accurately and delineated the tumor body as well as tumor peripheral regions covering typical mass boundaries and some spiculation patterns.Then the segmented results were evaluated by the classification accuracy.42 features including age,intensity,shape and texture were extracted from each segmented mass and support vector machine(SVM)was used as a classifier.The classification accuracy was evaluated using the area(A_(z))under the receiver operating characteristic(ROC)curve.It was found that the maximum likelihood analysis achieved an A_(z)value of 0.835,the maximum gradient analysis got an A_(z)value of 0.932 and the hybrid assessment function performed the best classification result where the value of A_(z)was 0.948.In addition,compared with traditional region growing algorithm,our proposed algorithm is more adaptive and provides a better performance for future works.

An Automatic Segmentation of Kidney in Serial Abdominal CT Scans Using Region Growing Approach

Automatic kidney segmentation from abdominal CT images is a key step in computer-aided diagnosis for kidney CT as well as computeraided surgery. However, kidney segmentation from CT images is generally performed manually or semi-autornatically because of gray levels similarities of adjacent organs/tissues in abdominal CT images. This paper presents an efficient algorithm for segmenting kidney from serials of abdominal CT images. First, we extracted estimated kidney position （EKP） according to the statistical geometric location of kidney within the abdomen. Second, we analyzed the intensity distribution of EKP for several abdominal CT images and exploit an adaptive threshold searching algorithm to eliminate many other organs/tissues in the EKP. Finally, a novel region growing approach based on labeling is used to obtain the fine kidney regions. Experimental results are comparable to those of manual tracing radiologist and shown to be efficient.