This paper presents a new analysis result of two-dimensional four-phase abdominal CT images using variational Bayesian mixture of ICA. The four-phase CT images are assumed to be comprised of several exclusive areas, and each area is generated by a set of corresponding independent components. ICA mixture analysis results show that the CT images could be divided into a set of clinically and anatomically meaningful components. Initial analysis of the independent components shows its promising prospects in medical image processing and computer-aided diagnosis.

This paper presents an ensemble learning algorithm for liver tumour segmentation from a CT volume in the form of U-Boost and extends the loss functions to improve performance. Five segmentation algorithms trained by the ensemble learning algorithm with different loss functions are compared in terms of error rate and Jaccard Index between the extracted regions and true ones.

This paper presents a novel liver segmentation algorithm that achieves higher performance than conventional algorithms in the segmentation of cases with unusual liver shapes and/or large liver lesions. An L1 norm was introduced to the mean squared difference to find the most relevant cases with an input case from a training dataset. A patient-specific probabilistic atlas was generated from the retrieved cases to compensate for livers with unusual shapes, which accounts for liver shape more specifically than a conventional probabilistic atlas that is averaged over a number of training cases. To make the above process robust against large pathological lesions, we incorporated a novel term based on a set of “lesion bases” proposed in this study that account for the differences from normal liver parenchyma. Subsequently, the patient-specific probabilistic atlas was forwarded to a graph-cuts-based fine segmentation step, in which a penalty function was computed from the probabilistic atlas. A leave-one-out test using clinical abdominal CT volumes was conducted to validate the performance, and proved that the proposed segmentation algorithm with the proposed patient-specific atlas reinforced by the lesion bases outperformed the conventional algorithm with a statistically significant difference.