A graph-based approach to automated EUS image layer segmentation and abnormal region detection.

Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) has shown great advantages in the diagnosis and staging of gastrointestinal malignant tumors. However, EUS based diagnosis is limited by variability in the examiner’s subjective interpretation to differentiate between normal and early esophageal carcinoma. In this paper, we propose a novel approach aiming at automatic abnormal region detection from the esophageal EUS images; the contribution is three-fold: first, we present a series of preprocessing strategies developed specifically for the enhancement of EUS images to aid the estimation in the subsequent works. Second, we provide an automatic layer segmentation method based on the multiple surface graph searching approach with incorporation of geometric constraints, which is applied to segment the EUS images into five discernible layers. Third, we introduce the novel feature extraction strategy by utilizing the features from each column in the segmented layers. The SVM classifier is then applied to fulfill the normal and early esophageal carcinoma classification. Subsequently, a clustering method is used to assemble the abnormal columns together so as to detect the abnormal region. Experimental results show that our method has demonstrated its robustness even facing noisy EUS images, and has achieved high accuracy in detecting abnormal region.