Biomedical subjects

Clay Spence

Publications and source records attributed to Clay Spence.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Varying complexity in tree-structured image distribution models.

Probabilistic models of image statistics underlie many approaches in image analysis and processing. An important class of such models have variables whose dependency graph is a tree. If the hidden variables take values on a finite set, most computations with the model can be performed exactly, including the likelihood calculation, training with the EM algorithm, etc. Crouse et al. developed one such model, the hidden Markov tree (HMT). They took particular care to limit the complexity of their model. We argue that it is beneficial to allow more complex tree-structured models, describe the use of information theoretic penalties to choose the model complexity, and present experimental results to support these proposals. For these experiments, we use what we call the hierarchical image probability (HIP) model. The differences between the HIP and the HMT models include the use of multivariate Gaussians to model the distributions of local vectors of wavelet coefficients and the use of different numbers of hidden states at each resolution. We demonstrate the broad utility of image distributions by applying the HIP model to classification, synthesis, and compression, across a variety of image types, namely, electrooptical, synthetic aperture radar, and mammograms (digitized X-rays). In all cases, we compare with the HMT.

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PubMed2003

A multi-scale probabilistic network model for detection, synthesis and compression in mammographic image analysis.

We develop a probabilistic network model over image spaces and demonstrate its broad utility in mammographic image analysis, particularly with respect to computer-aided diagnosis. The model employs a multi-scale pyramid decomposition to factor images across scale and a network of tree-structured hidden variables to capture long-range spatial dependencies. This factoring makes the computation of the density functions local and tractable. The result is a hierarchical mixture of conditional probabilities, similar to a hidden Markov model on a tree. The model parameters are found with maximum likelihood estimation using the expectation-maximization algorithm. The utility of the model is demonstrated for three applications: (1) detection of mammographic masses for computer-aided diagnosis; (2) qualitative assessment of model structure through mammographic synthesis; and (3) compression of mammographic regions of interest.

Female↗

PubMed2002

Learning contextual relationships in mammograms using a hierarchical pyramid neural network.

This paper describes a pattern recognition architecture, which we term hierarchical pyramid/neural network (HPNN), that learns to exploit image structure at multiple resolutions for detecting clinically significant features in digital/digitized mammograms. The HPNN architecture consists of a hierarchy of neural networks, each network receiving feature inputs at a given scale as well as features constructed by networks lower in the hierarchy. Networks are trained using a novel error function for the supervised learning of image search/detection tasks when the position of the objects to be found is uncertain or ill defined. We have evaluated the HPNN's ability to eliminate false positive (FP) regions of interest generated by the University of Chicago's (UofC) Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for microcalcification and mass detection. Results show that the HPNN architecture, trained using the uncertain object position (UOP) error function, reduces the FP rate of a mammographic CAD system by approximately 50% without significant loss in sensitivity. Investigation into the types of FPs that the HPNN eliminates suggests that the pattern recognizer is automatically learning and exploiting contextual information. Clinical utility is demonstrated through the evaluation of an integrated system in a clinical reader study. We conclude that the HPNN architecture learns contextual relationships between features at multiple scales and integrates these features for detecting microcalcifications and breast masses.

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