Tibia Bone Segmentation in X-Ray Images - A Comparative Analysis
Tibia Bone Segmentation in X-Ray Images - A Comparative Analysis
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
9. The new image obtained is Irot. Next, the co-ordinates of 1. Manual thresholding
Pixel based
the bounding box of the maximum area region in the 2. Otsu
above image are obtained.
3. Watershed Region based
10. Using these coordinates a rectangle containing the bone
region (ROI) is cropped from the image Irot. The new 4. Active contour Deformable model
image obtained is Icrop, which is the final pre-processed 5. Growcut Cellular automata
image Inew. The following section explains the concepts behind the
11. Stop segmentation techniques.
The size of test images obtained after pre-processing fall in 4.1 MANUAL THRESHOLDING
the following range: height = 367 – 530 (in pixels) and width Manual thresholding requires user effort for selecting the
= 50 – 191 (in pixels).One of the results is shown in Table 1. right threshold value and is usually done with the help of a
histogram, using trial and error method. It involves converting
Table 1. Preprocessing result the input image into binary image based on a fixed threshold.
Before After The input image pixels having intensities greater than the
threshold level are assigned the value 1 and all the other
pixels are assigned the value 0 in the output image. The
manual thresholding does not hold good since the intensity
distribution range for the 3 classes (Skin, bone and
background) is not unique and varies with different images as
well as the X-ray modality used. Often the three classes are
Image found to overlap for a given area on the histogram. Due to
these reasons this method is not suitable for tibia bone
segmentation problem. The segmentation result for a
threshold value of 153 is shown in Table 3.
4.2 OTSU THRESHOLDING
Otsu thresholding [14] attempts to find that threshold value
Size (in pixels) 2446 x 2010 461 x 100 for which the sum of variances of the foreground and
Angles (in degree) 60.22543 0 background pixels is at its minimum. It is an automated
technique and is easy to implement. However the regions in
the image need to be well separated in the histogram to give
perfect results.
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
Here three thresholds are found using Otsu method. The first
threshold (T1) is only good enough to segment the leg from
the background. So in order to get the bone the leg region is
provided to the Otsu algorithm to get the second threshold
(T2). But this results in over segmentation. So the region
having intensities between T1 and T2 is provided to the
algorithm to get a third threshold (T3). This has been tested to
give better results than T1 and T2.
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
4.4 ACTIVE CONTOUR However the active contour method is known to face
problems at concavities. Furthermore the snake needs to be
SEGMENTATION initialized close to the ROI. This is often done manually. The
Active contours [16] or Snakes are widely used for edge snake is found to be highly sensitive to its parameters which
detection in the field of image processing. A snake can be are initialized empirically to values that vary for different
defined as a spline curve which tends to minimize its energy. types of images. The result for AC model is given in Table 6.
The energy of the snake is dependent on its shape (internal
energy) and its location (external energy). The total energy of 4.5 GROWCUT
the snake is given by:- GrowCut [17] segmentation is an interactive process,
modelled by evolution of cellular automata. Here every pixel
in an image can be considered as a cell. The cells can be
initialized as foreground, background, or undefined. As the
The above equation involves a parametric snake given by s(p)
algorithm proceeds, these cells compete to dominate the
= (x(p),y(p)). Eint and Eext are the internal and external
image domain. Some cells capture their neighbours, replacing
energies of the snake.
their labels. The ability of a cell to spread depends on its
Eint can is given by the formula, feature vector and strength. There can be more than 2 class
labels in an image. It can be extended to N dimensions.
The growcut involves „for‟ loops which prove to be
computationally expensive in Matlab. To solve this problem,
It controls the mechanical behaviour of the snake by the code for growcut has been written in C in Matlab (i.e. as a
determining its shape. Here α and β are constants. If alpha is binary mex file). Mex stands for Matlab executable.
less, the snake can elongate more and if beta is less the snake The most important challenged faced in applying the growcut
can bend more. The internal energy is meant to force the algorithm is the computation time for large medical images.
snake to be small and smooth. The results reported in the original paper of growcut [17],
Eext is given by the equation, mention a segmentation time of 4 sec for a 256x256 image on
a 2.5 GHz processor. However for large images the
computation time required is 10 minutes, which is quite large.
To address this problem the images were resized. The mex
It depends on the properties of the image. The simplest form code for growcut has been implemented by Shawn Lankton
of external energy is the inverse of the gradient magnitude of and can be downloaded from [18].
the input image. The results obtained are given in Table 7.
Internal and external forces determine the shape and position Table 7. Active contour segmentation results
of the snake. The internal force keeps the snake smooth
whereas the external force guides the snake towards the image Input image Image with seeds Output Image
features.
The output of the snake model is a closed contour. This is
very advantages if the region boundary has discontinuities.
The snake tends to take the general shape of the image
boundary. Also the edges of output of the snake model are
very fine. This will prove to be advantages if ones interest lies
in extracting features pertaining to the edges.
Table 6. Active contour segmentation results
External
Input Spline Segmented
Force
Image Image Tibia bone
Field
5. VALIDATION
It is not possible to visually inspect the subtle differences
between an expert segmented image and a user segmented
image at all times [19]. In order to compare different
segmentation techniques and to encourage programmers to
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
Table 8. Averages of validation parameters and specificity as compared to watershed which means that its
accuracy is higher compared to watershed. Its relatively
AVERAGES higher value for specificity as compared to sensitivity implies
Methods t (sec) fnr fpr J D that it suffers more from under segmentation error as
(%) (%) compared to over segmentation error. Growcut performs the
Manual Thresholding 0.40 54 12 0.30 0.44 best among the 5 techniques and records a low value of 6%
and 1% of under and over segmentation error respectively.
Otsu Thresholding 0.48 17 25 0.44 0.61
Watershed 0.89 17 18 0.60 0.73
Active Contours 8.69 13 2 0.82 0.90
Growcut 3.78 6 1 0.90 0.95
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 76– No.9, August 2013
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