1. |
- Hult, Roger, 1969-
(author)
-
Segmentation and Visualisation of Human Brain Structures
- 2003
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this thesis the focus is mainly on the development of segmentation techniques for human brain structures and of the visualisation of such structures. The images of the brain are both anatomical images (magnet resonance imaging (MRI) and autoradigraphy) and functional images that show blood flow (functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and single photon emission tomograpy (SPECT)). When working with anatomical images, the structures segmented are visible as different parts of the brain, e.g. the brain cortex, the hippocampus, or the amygdala. In functional images, the activity or the blood flow that be seen.Grey-level morphology methods are used in the segmentations to make tissue types in the images more homogenous and minimise difficulties with connections to outside tissue. A method for automatic histogram thresholding is also used. Furthermore, there are binary operations such as logic operation between masks and binary morphology operations.The visualisation of the segmented structures uses either surface rendering or volume rendering. For the visualisation of thin structures, surface rendering is the better choice since otherwise some voxels might be missed. It is possible to display activation from a functional image on the surface of a segmented cortex. A new method for autoradiographic images has been developed, which integrates registration, background compensation, and automatic thresholding to getfaster and more realible results than the standard techniques give.
|
|
3. |
- Wehrmann, Felix, 1971-
(author)
-
On Modelling Nonlinear Variation in Discrete Appearances of Objects
- 2004
-
Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Mathematical models of classes of objects can significantly contribute to the analysis of digital images. A major problem in modelling is to establish suitable descriptions that cover not only a single object but also the variation that is usually present within a class of objects.The objective of this thesis is to develop more general modelling strategies than commonly used today. In particular, the impact of the human factor in the model creation process should be minimised. It is presumed that the human ability of abstraction imposes undesired constraints on the description. In comparison, common approaches are discussed from the viewpoint of generality.The technique considered introduces appearance space as a common framework to represent both shapes and images. In appearance space, an object is represented by a single point in a high-dimensional vector space. Accordingly, objects subject to variation appear as nonlinear manifolds in appearance space. These manifolds are often characterised by only a few intrinsic dimensions. A model of a class of objects is therefore considered equal to the mathematical description of this manifold.The presence of nonlinearity motivates the use of artificial auto-associative neural networks in the modelling process. The network extracts nonlinear modes of variation from a number of training examples. The procedure is evaluated on both synthetic and natural data of shapes and images and shows promising results as a general approach to object modelling.
|
|