Anil Kumar Sao

Prabhjot Kaur, Atul Singh Minhas, Chirag Kamal Ahuja et al.

Limited accessibility to high field MRI scanners (such as 7T, 11T) has motivated the development of post-processing methods to improve low field images. Several existing post-processing methods have shown the feasibility to improve 3T images to produce 7T-like images [3,18]. It has been observed that improving lower field (LF, <=1.5T) images comes with additional challenges due to poor image quality such as the function mapping 1.5T and higher field (HF, 3T) images is more complex than the function relating 3T and 7T images [10]. Except for [10], no method has been addressed to improve <=1.5T MRI images. Further, most of the existing methods [3,18] including [10] require example images, and also often rely on pixel to pixel correspondences between LF and HF images which are usually inaccurate for <=1.5T images. The focus of this paper is to address the unsupervised framework for quality improvement of 1.5T images and avoid the expensive requirements of example images and associated image registration. The LF and HF images are assumed to be related by a linear transformation (LT). The unknown HF image and unknown LT are estimated in alternate minimization framework. Further, a physics based constraint is proposed that provides an additional non-linear function relating LF and HF images in order to achieve the desired high contrast in estimated HF image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach provides processed 1.5T images, i.e., estimated 3T-like images with improved image quality, and is comparably better than the existing methods addressing similar problems. The improvement in image quality is also shown to provide better tissue segmentation and volume quantification as compared to scanner acquired 1.5T images.

Srishti Gautam, Harinarayan K. K., Nirmal Jith et al.

It has been shown that for automated PAP-smear image classification, nucleus features can be very informative. Therefore, the primary step for automated screening can be cell-nuclei detection followed by segmentation of nuclei in the resulting single cell PAP-smear images. We propose a patch based approach using CNN for segmentation of nuclei in single cell images. We then pose the question of ion of segmentation for classification using representation learning with CNN, and whether low-level CNN features may be useful for classification. We suggest a CNN-based feature level analysis and a transfer learning based approach for classification using both segmented as well full single cell images. We also propose a decision-tree based approach for classification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms individually (with low-level CNN features), and simultaneously proving the sufficiency of cell-nuclei detection (rather than accurate segmentation) for classification. Thus, we propose a system for analysis of multi-cell PAP-smear images consisting of a simple nuclei detection algorithm followed by classification using transfer learning.

V. Abrol, P. Sharma, A. K Sao

In compressed sensing (CS) framework, a signal is sampled below Nyquist rate, and the acquired compressed samples are generally random in nature. However, for efficient estimation of the actual signal, the sensing matrix must preserve the relative distances among the acquired compressed samples. Provided this condition is fulfilled, we show that CS samples will preserve the envelope of the actual signal even at different compression ratios. Exploiting this envelope preserving property of CS samples, we propose a new fast dictionary learning (DL) algorithm which is able to extract prototype signals from compressive samples for efficient sparse representation and recovery of signals. These prototype signals are orthogonal intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) extracted using empirical mode decomposition (EMD), which is one of the popular methods to capture the envelope of a signal. The extracted IMFs are used to build the dictionary without even comprehending the original signal or the sensing matrix. Moreover, one can build the dictionary on-line as new CS samples are available. In particularly, to recover first $L$ signals ($\in\mathbb{R}^n$) at the decoder, one can build the dictionary in just $\mathcal{O}(nL\log n)$ operations, that is far less as compared to existing approaches. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated experimentally for recovery of speech signals.