A Combined Spatial and Frequency Based Texture Model for Organ Segmentation in Computed Tomography Examinations

Abstract

The organ segmentation in computed tomography (CT) examination is a tedious and error prone task. The local similarity of the pixels from different organs, and the differences between the pixels of the same organ observed in different examinations are two most challenging problems affecting the segmentation process. In this study, statistical and spectral texture properties are combined with the a-priori knowledge about the human body to develop a model for reliably segmenting organs in CT examinations. The main goal of the developed model is fusing local and global statistics to support spatial-frequency analysis and to maximize the simultaneous localization of energy in both spatial and frequency domains. The feature space dimension is reduced by means of a wrapper technique applied as a pre-processing filter. The proposed classifier utilizes a linear combination (ensemble) of two support vector machines (SVM) where the first SVM classifies the input samples according to their textural information and the second one correct the results of the first classifier by searching the spatial information of those samples in a statistical atlas.