Segmentation of knee injuries swelling on infrared images
Résumé
Interpretation of medical infrared images is complex due to thermal noise, absence of texture, and small temperature differences in pathological zones. Acute inflammatory response is a characteristic symptom of some knee injuries like anterior cruciate ligament sprains, muscle or tendons strains, and meniscus tear. Whereas artificial coloring of the original grey level images may allow to visually assess the extent inflammation in the area, their automated segmentation remains a challenging problem. This paper presents a hybrid segmentation algorithm to evaluate the extent of inflammation after knee injury, in terms of temperature variations and surface shape. It is based on the intersection of rapid color segmentation and homogeneous region segmentation, to which a Laplacian of a Gaussian filter is applied. While rapid color segmentation enables to properly detect the observed core of swollen area, homogeneous region segmentation identifies possible inflammation zones, combining homogeneous grey level and hue area segmentation. The hybrid segmentation algorithm compares the potential inflammation regions partially detected by each method to identify overlapping areas. Noise filtering and edge segmentation are then applied to common zones in order to segment the swelling surfaces of the injury. Experimental results on images of a patient with anterior cruciate ligament sprain show the improved performance of the hybrid algorithm with respect to its separated components. The main contribution of this work is a meaningful automatic segmentation of abnormal skin temperature variations on infrared thermography images of knee injury swelling.