Fuzzy object modeling
Jayaram K. Udupa, Dewey Odhner, Alexandre X. Falcão, Krzysztof Chris Ciesielski, Paulo A. V. Miranda, Pavithra Vaideeswaran, Shipra Mishra, George J. Grevera, Babak Saboury, Drew A. Torigian · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2011
To make Quantitative Radiology (QR) a reality in routine clinical practice, computerized automatic anatomy recognition (AAR) becomes essential. As part of this larger goal, we present in this paper a novel fuzzy strategy for building bodywide group-wise anatomic models. They have the potential to handle uncertainties and variability in anatomy naturally and to be integrated with the fuzzy connectedness framework for image segmentation. Our approach is to build a family of models, called the Virtual Quantitative Human, representing normal adult subjects at a chosen resolution of the population variables (gender, age). Models are represented hierarchically, the descendents representing organs contained in parent organs. Based on an index of fuzziness of the models, 32 thorax data sets, and 10 organs defined in them, we found that the hierarchical approach to modeling can effectively handle the non-linear relationships in position, scale, and orientation that exist among organs in different patients.