Abdominal organ segmentation using texture transforms and a Hopfield neural network

Abdominal organ segmentation is highly desirable but difficult, due to larg e differences between patients and to overlapping grey-scale values of the various tissue types. The first step in automating this process is to clust er together the pixels within each organ or tissue type. We propose to Form images based on second-order statistical texture transforms (Haralick tran sforms) of a CT or MRI scan. The original scan plus the suite of texture tr ansforms are then input into a Hopfield neural network (HNN). The network i s constructed to solve an optimization problem, where the best solution is the minima of a Lyapunov energy function. On a sample abdominal CT scan, th is process successfully clustered 79-100% of the pixels of seven abdominal organs. It is envisioned that this Is the first step to automate segmentati on. Active contouring (e.g., SNAKE's) or a back-propagation neural network can then be used to assign names to the clusters and fill in the incorrectl y clustered pixels.