Long-range medical image registration through generalized mutual information (GMI): toward a fully automatic volumetric alignment

Image registration is a key operation in medical image processing, allowing a plethora of applications. Mutual information (MI) is consolidated as a robust similarity metric often used for medical image registration. Although MI provides a robust medical image registration, it usually fails when the needed image transform is too big due to MI local maxima traps. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a generalized parametric MI as an affine registration cost function. We assessed the generalized MI (GMI) functions for separable affine transforms and exhaustively evaluated the GMI mathematical image seeking the maximum registration range through a gradient descent simulation. We also employed Monte Carlo simulation essays for testing translation registering of randomized T1 versus T2 images. GMI functions showed to have smooth isosurfaces driving the algorithm to the global maxima. Results show significantly prolonged registration ranges, avoiding the traps of local maxima. We evaluated a range of [-150mm,150mm] for translations, [-180{\deg},180{\deg}] for rotations, [0.5,2] for scales, and [-1,1] for skew with a success rate of 99.99%, 97.58%, 99.99%, and 99.99% respectively for the transforms in the simulated gradient descent. We also obtained 99.75% success in Monte Carlo simulation from 2,000 randomized translations trials with 1,113 subjects T1 and T2 MRI images. The findings point towards the reliability of GMI for long-range registration with enhanced speed performance

Analysis of Generalized Entropies in Mutual Information Medical Image Registration

Mutual information (MI) is the standard method used in image registration and the most studied one but can diverge and produce wrong results when used in an automated manner. In this study we compared the results of the ITK Mattes MI function, used in 3D Slicer and ITK derived software solutions, and our own MICUDA Shannon and Tsallis MI functions under the translation, rotation and scale transforms in a 3D mathematical space. This comparison allows to understand why registration fails in some circumstances and how to produce a more robust automated algorithm to register medical images. Since our algorithms were designed to use GPU computations we also have a huge gain in speed while improving the quality of registration.

Study and development of a Computer-Aided Diagnosis system for classification of chest x-ray images using convolutional neural networks pre-trained for ImageNet and data augmentation

Convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) are the actual standard for image recognizement and classification. On the present work we develop a Computer Aided-Diagnosis (CAD) system using ConvNets to classify a x-rays chest images dataset in two groups: Normal and Pneumonia. The study uses ConvNets models available on the PyTorch platform: AlexNet, SqueezeNet, ResNet and Inception. We initially use three training styles: complete from scratch using random initialization, using a pre-trained ImageNet model training only the last layer adapted to our problem (transfer learning) and a pre-trained model modified training all the classifying layers of the model (fine tuning). The last strategy of training used is with data augmentation techniques that avoid over fitting problems on ConvNets yielding the better results on this study