A Comparative Study of Automated Segmentation Methods for Use in a Microwave Tomography System for Imaging Intracerebral Hemorrhage in Stroke Patients
Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2015

Microwave technology offers the possibility for pre-hospital stroke detection as we have pre- viously demonstrated using non-imaging diagnostics. The focus in this paper is on image-based diagnostics wherein the technical and computational complexities of image reconstruction are a challenge for clinical realization. Herein we investigate whether information about a patient’s brain anatomy obtained prior to a stroke event can be used to facilitate image-based stroke diag- nostics. A priori information can be obtained by segmenting the patient’s head tissues from mag- netic resonance images. Expert manual segmentation is presently the gold standard, but it is labo- rious and subjective. A fully automatic method is thus desirable. This paper presents an evaluation of several such methods using both synthetic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data and real da- ta from four healthy subjects. The segmentation was performed on the full 3D MRI data, whereas the electromagnetic evaluation was performed using a 2D slice. The methods were evaluated in terms of: i) tissue classification accuracy over all tissues with respect to ground truth, ii) the accu- racy of the simulated electromagnetic wave propagation through the head, and iii) the accuracy of the image reconstruction of the hemorrhage. The segmentation accuracy was measured in terms of the degree of overlap (Dice score) with the ground truth. The electromagnetic simulation accu- racy was measured in terms of signal deviation relative to the simulation based on the ground truth. Finally, the image reconstruction accuracy was measured in terms of the Dice score, relative error of dielectric properties, and visual comparison between the true and reconstructed intrace- rebral hemorrhage. The results show that accurate segmentation of tissues (Dice score = 0.97) from the MRI data can lead to accurate image reconstruction (relative error = 0.24) for the intra- cerebral hemorrhage in the subject’s brain. They also suggest that accurate automated segmenta- tion can be used as a surrogate for manual segmentation and can facilitate the rapid diagnosis of intracerebral hemorrhage in stroke patients using a microwave imaging system.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Dielectric Head Model

Microwave

Automatic Segmentation

Intracerebral Hemorrhage Reconstruction

Författare

Mahmood Qaiser

Chalmers, Signaler och system

Shaochuan Li

Chalmers, Signaler och system

Andreas Fhager

Chalmers, Signaler och system

Stefan Candefjord

Chalmers, Signaler och system, Signalbehandling och medicinsk teknik

Artur Chodorowski

Chalmers, Signaler och system

Mikael Persson

Chalmers, Signaler och system

Journal of Electromagnetic Analysis and Applications

1942-0749 (ISSN)

Vol. 7 152-167

Ämneskategorier

Signalbehandling

DOI

10.4236/jemaa.2015.75017

Mer information

Skapat

2017-10-07