In the medical sector, three-dimensional (3D) images are commonly used like computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The 3D MRI is a non-invasive method of studying the soft-tissue structures in a knee joint for osteoarthritis studies. It can greatly improve the accuracy of segmenting structures such as cartilage, bone marrow lesion, and meniscus by identifying the bone structure first. U-net is a convolutional neural network that was originally designed to segment the biological images with limited training data. The input of the original U-net is a single 2D image and the output is a binary 2D image. In this study, we modified the U-net model to identify the knee bone structures using 3D MRI, which is a sequence of 2D slices. A fully automatic model has been proposed to detect and segment knee bones. The proposed model was trained, tested, and validated using 99 knee MRI cases where each case consists of 160 2D slices for a single knee scan. To evaluate the model’s performance, the similarity, dice coefficient (DICE), and area error metrics were calculated. Separate models were trained using different knee bone components including tibia, femur, patella, as well as a combined model for segmenting all the knee bones. Using the whole MRI sequence (160 slices), the method was able to detect the beginning and ending bone slices first, and then segment the bone structures for all the slices in between. On the testing set, the detection model accomplished 98.79% accuracy and the segmentation model achieved DICE 96.94% and similarity 93.98%. The proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, i.e., it outperforms U-net by 3.68%, SegNet by 14.45%, and FCN-8 by 2.34%, in terms of DICE score using the same dataset.
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Characterizing robustness and sensitivity of convolutional neural networks for quantitative analysis of mitochondrial morphology
Quantitative analysis of mitochondrial morphology plays important roles in studies of mitochondrial biology. The analysis depends critically on segmentation of mitochondria, the image analysis process of extracting mitochondrial morphology from images. The main goal of this study is to characterize the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in segmentation of mitochondria from fluorescence microscopy images. Recently, CNNs have achieved remarkable success in challenging image segmentation tasks in several disciplines. So far, however, our knowledge of their performance in segmenting biological images remains limited. In particular, we know little about their robustness, which defines their capability of segmenting biological images of different conditions, and their sensitivity, which defines their capability of detecting subtle morphological changes of biological objects.
We have developed a method that uses realistic synthetic images of different conditions to characterize the robustness and sensitivity of CNNs in segmentation of mitochondria. Using this method, we compared performance of two widely adopted CNNs: the fully convolutional network (FCN) and the U‐Net. We further compared the two networks against the adaptive active‐mask (AAM) algorithm, a representative of high‐performance conventional segmentation algorithms.
The FCN and the U‐Net consistently outperformed the AAM in accuracy, robustness, and sensitivity, often by a significant margin. The U‐Net provided overall the best performance.
Our study demonstrates superior performance of the U‐Net and the FCN in segmentation of mitochondria. It also provides quantitative measurements of the robustness and sensitivity of these networks that are essential to their applications in quantitative analysis of mitochondrial morphology.
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10478010
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Quantitative Biology
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2095-4689
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 344-358
- Size(s):
- ["p. 344-358"]
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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