Level Set Method In Medical Imaging Segmentation

Level set methods are numerical techniques which offer remarkably powerful tools for understanding, analyzing, and computing interface motion in a host of settings. When used for medical imaging analysis and segmentation, the function assigns a label to each pixel or voxel and optimality is defined based on desired imaging properties. This often includes a detection step to extract specific objects via segmentation. This allows for the segmentation and analysis problem to be formulated and solved in a principled way based on well-established mathematical theories. Level set method is a great tool for modeling time varying medical images and enhancement of numerical computations.

Image segmentation consists of dividing an image domain into disjoint regions according to a characterization of the image within or in-between the regions. Therefore, segmenting an image is to divide its domain into relevant components. The efficient solution of the key problems in image segmentation promises to enable a rich array of useful applications. The current major application areas include robotics, medical image analysis, remote sensing, scene understanding, and image database retrieval. The subject of this book is image segmentation by variational methods with a focus on formulations which use closed regular plane curves to define the segmentation regions and on a level set implementation of the corresponding active curve evolution algorithms. Each method is developed from an objective functional which embeds constraints on both the image domain partition of the segmentation and the image data within or in-between the partition regions. The necessary conditions to optimize the objective functional are then derived and solved numerically. The book covers, within the active curve and level set formalism, the basic two-region segmentation methods, multiregion extensions, region merging, image modeling, and motion based segmentation. To treat various important classes of images, modeling investigates several parametric distributions such as the Gaussian, Gamma, Weibull, and Wishart. It also investigates non-parametric models. In motion segmentation, both optical flow and the movement of real three-dimensional objects are studied.

First of all, we want to congratulate two new research communities from M- ico and Brazil that have recently joined the Iberoamerican community and the International Association for Pattern Recognition. We believe that the series of congresses that started as the “Taller Iberoamericano de Reconocimiento de Patrones (TIARP)”, and later became the “Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition (CIARP)”, has contributed to these groupconsolidatione?orts. We hope that in the near future all the Iberoamerican countries will have their own groups and associations to promote our areas of interest; and that these congresses will serve as the forum for scienti?c research exchange, sharing of - pertise and new knowledge, and establishing contacts that improve cooperation between research groups in pattern recognition and related areas. CIARP 2004 (9th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition) was the ninthinaseriesofpioneeringcongressesonpatternrecognitionintheIberoam- ican community. As in the previous year, CIARP 2004 also included worldwide participation. It took place in Puebla, Mexico. The aim of the congress was to promote and disseminate ongoing research and mathematical methods for pattern recognition, image analysis, and applications in such diverse areas as computer vision, robotics, industry, health, entertainment, space exploration, telecommunications, data mining, document analysis,and natural languagep- cessing and recognition, to name a few.

Here is, for the first time, a book that clearly explains and applies new level set methods to problems and applications in computer vision, graphics, and imaging. It is an essential compilation of survey chapters from the leading researchers in the field. The applications of the methods are emphasized.

As one of the most important tasks in biomedical imaging, image segmentation provides the foundation for quantitative reasoning and diagnostic techniques. A large variety of different imaging techniques, each with its own physical principle and characteristics (e.g., noise modeling), often requires modality-specific algorithmic treatment. In recent years, substantial progress has been made to biomedical image segmentation. Biomedical image segmentation is characterized by several specific factors. This book presents an overview of the advanced segmentation algorithms and their applications.

The 11th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2008, was held at the Helen and Martin Kimmel Center of New York University, New York City, USA on September 6–10, 2008. MICCAI is the premier international conference in this domain, with - depth papers on the multidisciplinary ?elds of biomedical image computing and analysis, computer assisted intervention and medical robotics. The conference brings together biological scientists, clinicians, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicists and other interested researchers and o?ers them a forum to exchange ideas in these exciting and rapidly growing ?elds. The conference is both very selective and very attractive: this year we - ceived a record number of 700 submissions from 34 countries and 6 continents, fromwhich258papers were selectedfor publication,whichcorrespondsto a s- cess rate of approximately 36%. Some interesting facts about the distribution of submitted and accepted papers are shown graphically at the end of this preface. The paper selection process this year was based on the following procedure, which included the introduction of several novelties over previous years. 1. A ProgramCommittee (PC) of 49 members was recruited by the Program Chairs,to getthenecessarybody ofexpertiseandgeographicalcoverage.All PC members agreed in advance to participate in the ?nal paper selection process. 2. Key words grouped in 7 categories were used to describe the content of the submissions and the expertise of the reviewers.

The two-volume set LNCS 4190 and LNCS 4191 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2006. The program committee carefully selected 39 revised full papers and 193 revised poster papers for presentation in two volumes. This second volume collects 118 papers related to segmentation, validation and quantitative image analysis, brain image processing, and much more.

We met again in front of the statue of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz in the city of Leipzig. Leibniz, a famous son of Leipzig, planned automatic logical inference using symbolic computation, aimed to collate all human knowledge. Today, artificial intelligence deals with large amounts of data and knowledge and finds new information using machine learning and data mining. Machine learning and data mining are irreplaceable subjects and tools for the theory of pattern recognition and in applications of pattern recognition such as bioinformatics and data retrieval. This was the fourth edition of MLDM in Pattern Recognition which is the main event of Technical Committee 17 of the International Association for Pattern Recognition; it started out as a workshop and continued as a conference in 2003. Today, there are many international meetings which are titled “machine learning” and “data mining”, whose topics are text mining, knowledge discovery, and applications. This meeting from the first focused on aspects of machine learning and data mining in pattern recognition problems. We planned to reorganize classical and well-established pattern recognition paradigms from the viewpoints of machine learning and data mining. Though it was a challenging program in the late 1990s, the idea has inspired new starting points in pattern recognition and effects in other areas such as cognitive computer vision.