Beibei Cheng

Automatic segmentation of subfigure image panels for multimodal biomedical document retrieval

Biomedical images are often referenced for clinical decision support (CDS), educational purposes, and research. The task of automatically finding the images in a scientific article that are most useful for the purpose of determining relevance to a clinical situation is traditionally done using text and is quite challenging. We propose to improve this by associating image features from the entire image and from relevant regions of interest with biomedical concepts described in the figure caption or discussion in the article. However, images used in scientific article figures are often composed of multiple panels where each sub-figure (panel) is referenced in the caption using alphanumeric labels, e.g. Figure 1(a), 2(c), etc. It is necessary to separate individual panels from a multi-panel figure as a first step toward automatic annotation of images. In this work we present methods that add make robust our previous efforts reported here. Specifically, we address the limitation in segmenting figures that do not exhibit explicit inter-panel boundaries, e.g. illustrations, graphs, and charts. We present a novel hybrid clustering algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) with fuzzy logic controller (FLC) to locate related figure components in such images. Results from our evaluation are very promising with 93.64% panel detection accuracy for regular (non-illustration) figure images and 92.1% accuracy for illustration images. A computational complexity analysis also shows that PSO is an optimal approach with relatively low computation time. The accuracy of separating these two type images is 98.11% and is achieved using decision tree.

Automatic telangiectasia analysis in dermoscopy images using adaptive critic design.

Telangiectasia, tiny skin vessels, are important dermoscopy structures used to discriminate basal cell carcinoma (BCC) from benign skin lesions. This research builds off of previously developed image analysis techniques to identify vessels automatically to discriminate benign lesions from BCCs.

Automatic detection of basal cell carcinoma using telangiectasia analysis in dermoscopy skin lesion images

Background: Telangiectasia, dilated blood vessels near the surface of the skin of small, varying diameter, are critical dermoscopy structures used in the detection of basal cell carcinoma (BCC). Distinguishing these vessels from other telangiectasia, that are commonly found in sun‐damaged skin, is challenging.

Analysis of clinical and dermoscopic features for basal cell carcinoma neural network classification.

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the USA. In this research, we examine four different feature categories used for diagnostic decisions, including patient personal profile (patient age, gender, etc.), general exam (lesion size and location), common dermoscopic (blue‐gray ovoids, leaf‐structure dirt trails, etc.), and specific dermoscopic lesion (white/pink areas, semitranslucency, etc.). Specific dermoscopic features are more restricted versions of the common dermoscopic features.

Automatic dirt trail analysis in dermoscopy images.

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common cancer in the US. Dermatoscopes are devices used by physicians to facilitate the early detection of these cancers based on the identification of skin lesion structures often specific to BCCs. One new lesion structure, referred to as dirt trails, has the appearance of dark gray, brown or black dots and clods of varying sizes distributed in elongated clusters with indistinct borders, often appearing as curvilinear trails.

Graphical Figure Classification Using Data Fusion for Integrating Text and Image Features

This paper describes a multimodal (image + text) learning approach for automatically identifying three graphical figure types commonly found in biomedical literature, namely, diagrams, statistical figures and flow charts. The goal is to improve retrieval of figures from biomedical journal articles. In this article, we describe a data fusion approach to combine information from both text and image sources, believed to contain complementary information. Text information about the image is extracted from the figure caption. The data fusion process includes a hybrid of evolutionary algorithm (EA) and Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) called method applied to find an optimal subset of extracted image features. Chi-square statistic and information gain metric are used to select the optimal subset of extracted text features, which along with image features are input to Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network classifiers, whose outputs are characterized as fuzzy sets to determine the final classification result. Evaluation performed on 1707 figure images extracted from a test subset of Biome Central® journals extracted from U.S. National Library of Medicines PubMed Central ® repository yielded classification accuracy as high as 96.1%.

Automated Text Detection and Recognition in Annotated Biomedical Publication Images

Images in biomedical publications often convey important information related to an articles content. When referenced properly, these images aid in clinical decision support. Annotations such as text labels and symbols, as provided by medical experts, are used to highlight regions of interest within the images. These annotations, if extracted automatically, could be used in conjunction with either the image caption text or the image citations (mentions) in the articles to improve biomedical information retrieval. In the current study, automatic detection and recognition of text labels in biomedical publication images was investigated. This paper presents both image analysis and feature-based approaches to extract and recognize specific regions of interest (text labels) within images in biomedical publications. Experiments were performed on 6515 characters extracted from text labels present in 200 biomedical publication images. These images are part of the data set from ImageCLEF 2010. Automated character recognition experiments were conducted using geometry-, region-, exemplar-, and profile-based correlation features and Fourier descriptors extracted from the characters. Correct recognition as high as 92.67% was obtained with a support vector machine classifier, compared to a 75.90% correct recognition rate with a benchmark Optical Character Recognition technique.

Graphical image classification combining an evolutionary algorithm and binary particle swarm optimization

Biomedical journal articles contain a variety of image types that can be broadly classified into two categories: regular images, and graphical images. Graphical images can be further classified into four classes: diagrams, statistical figures, flow charts, and tables. Automatic figure type identification is an important step toward improved multimodal (text + image) information retrieval and clinical decision support applications. This paper describes a feature-based learning approach to automatically identify these four graphical figure types. We apply Evolutionary Algorithm (EA), Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) and a hybrid of EA and BPSO (EABPSO) methods to select an optimal subset of extracted image features that are then classified using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Evaluation performed on 1038 figure images extracted from ten BioMedCentral® journals with the features selected by EABPSO yielded classification accuracy as high as 87.5%.