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. 2015:2015:389057.
doi: 10.1155/2015/389057. Epub 2015 May 18.

Developing an Intelligent Automatic Appendix Extraction Method from Ultrasonography Based on Fuzzy ART and Image Processing

Kwang Baek Kim  1 , Hyun Jun Park  2 , Doo Heon Song  3 , Sang-suk Han  4
Affiliations

Developing an Intelligent Automatic Appendix Extraction Method from Ultrasonography Based on Fuzzy ART and Image Processing

Kwang Baek Kim et al. Comput Math Methods Med. 2015.

Abstract

Ultrasound examination (US) does a key role in the diagnosis and management of the patients with clinically suspected appendicitis which is the most common abdominal surgical emergency. Among the various sonographic findings of appendicitis, outer diameter of the appendix is most important. Therefore, clear delineation of the appendix on US images is essential. In this paper, we propose a new intelligent method to extract appendix automatically from abdominal sonographic images as a basic building block of developing such an intelligent tool for medical practitioners. Knowing that the appendix is located at the lower organ area below the bottom fascia line, we conduct a series of image processing techniques to find the fascia line correctly. And then we apply fuzzy ART learning algorithm to the organ area in order to extract appendix accurately. The experiment verifies that the proposed method is highly accurate (successful in 38 out of 40 cases) in extracting appendix.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Process of Appendix extraction.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Effect of Ends-in Search Stretching.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Effect of Region Labeling.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The effect of cubic spline interpolation.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Process diagram for fuzzy ART.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Distance based fuzzy ART process flow diagram.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Screenshot of proposed software.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Examples of experiment result.
Figure 9
Figure 9
False positive case of K-means compared with proposed fuzzy ART in extraction.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Quantization and binarization by ART2 and by proposed method.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Failed appendicitis extraction case by proposed method.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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