%0 Journal Article
%T Multiresolution Analysis Using Wavelet, Ridgelet, and Curvelet Transforms for Medical Image Segmentation
%A Shadi AlZubi
%A Naveed Islam
%A Maysam Abbod
%J International Journal of Biomedical Imaging
%D 2011
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2011/136034
%X The experimental study presented in this paper is aimed at the development of an automatic image segmentation system for classifying region of interest (ROI) in medical images which are obtained from different medical scanners such as PET, CT, or MRI. Multiresolution analysis (MRA) using wavelet, ridgelet, and curvelet transforms has been used in the proposed segmentation system. It is particularly a challenging task to classify cancers in human organs in scanners output using shape or gray-level information; organs shape changes throw different slices in medical stack and the gray-level intensity overlap in soft tissues. Curvelet transform is a new extension of wavelet and ridgelet transforms which aims to deal with interesting phenomena occurring along curves. Curvelet transforms has been tested on medical data sets, and results are compared with those obtained from the other transforms. Tests indicate that using curvelet significantly improves the classification of abnormal tissues in the scans and reduce the surrounding noise. 1. Introduction In the last decade, the use of 3D image processing has been increased especially for medical applications; this leads to increase the qualified radiologistsĄŻ number who navigate, view, analyse, segment, and interpret medical images. The analysis and visualization of the image stack received from the acquisition devices are difficult to evaluate due to the quantity of clinical data and the amount of noise existing in medical images due to the scanners itself. Computerized analysis and automated information systems can offer help dealing with the large amounts of data, and new image processing techniques may help to denoise those images. Multiresolution analysis (MRA) [1¨C3] has been successfully used in image processing specially with image segmentation, wavelet-based features has been used in various applications including image compression [4], denoising [5], and classification [6]. Recently, the finite ridgelet and curvelet transforms have been introduced as a higher dimensional MRA tool [7, 8]. Image segmentation requires extracting specific features from an image by distinguishing objects from the background. The process involves classifying each pixel of an image into a set of distinct classes, where the number of classes is much smaller. Medical image segmentation aims to separate known anatomical structures from the background such cancer diagnosis, quantification of tissue volumes, radiotherapy treatment planning, and study of anatomical structures. Segmentation can be manually performed by a human
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijbi/2011/136034/