Journal of Applied Sciences ›› 2019, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (3): 359-368.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.0255-8297.2019.03.006

• Signal and Information Processing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Automatic Extraction of Regions of Peripheral Nerve Internal Fascicular Groups from MicroCT Images

LI Fang1, ZHONG Yingchun2, QI Jian3, LUO Peng4   

  1. 1. School of Information, Guangdong University of Finance & Economy, Guangzhou 510300, China;
    2. School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China;
    3. Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510080, China;
    4. Department of Bone and Joint Surgery, Shenzhen Sixth People's Hospital, Shenzhen 518000, China
  • Received:2018-03-07 Revised:2018-07-22 Online:2019-05-31 Published:2019-05-31

Abstract: A novel algorithm to extract the region of peripheral nerve internal fascicular groups automatically from MicroCT images is proposed. 1) the contour and non-contour of fascicular groups in the first MicroCT image were marked manually. 2) the sparse auto encoder (SAE) was employed to extract the features unsupervisedly and the corresponding neural network was trained in order to recognize the contour in the second image. 3) the contour and non-contour of fascicular groups in the second MicroCT image were used as the labeled samples to train a new neural network. 4) above process was repeated until all images were processed completely. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the algorithm in this paper reaches 84.7% of manual's and it can process 522 images only in 0.3~0.4 h. Additionally, not only the single groups but also the splitting and emerging groups can be extracted rapidly and accurately.

Key words: MicroCT, sparse auto encoder, peripheral nerve, fascicular groups, deep learning

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