AN AI SEGMENTER ON MEDICAL IMAGING FOR GEOMATICS APPLICATIONS CONSISTING OF A TWO-STATE PIPELINE, SNNS NETWORK AND WATERSHED ALGORITHM

Abstract

As is well known, image segmentation is widely used in the fields of echocardiography and diagnostic and interventional radiology. The delineation of structural components of various organs from 2D images is a technique used in the medical field in order to identify intervention targets with increasing precision and accuracy. In recent decades, the automation of this task has been the subject of intensive research. In particular, to improve the segmentation of such images, investigations have focused on the use of neural networks, and in particular convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most existing CNN-based methods can produce unsatisfactory segmentation masks without precise object boundaries (Wang, Chen, Ji, Fan & Ye Li, 2022); this is mainly due to the shadows and high noise in these images. To address the problem of automated image segmentation, this work proposes a pipeline technique with two stages (applied primarily to the echocardiographic domain): the first consisting of a Self-normalising Neural Networks (SNNs) performs image denoising, while the second applies a Watershed segmentation algorithm on the cleaned image. The latter is a technique successfully applied in geomatics and land surveying. The proposed methodology may be of interest both in the medical field and in the field of Geomatics where segmentation and classification operations are required in different application areas.