《A reinforcement agent for object segmentation in ultrasound images》.pdf

Available online at Expert Systems with Applications Expert Systems with Applications 35 (2008) 772–780 /locate/eswa A reinforcement agent for object segmentation in ultrasound images Farhang Sahba a,c,*, Hamid R. Tizhoosh a,c, Magdy M.M.A. Salama b a Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada b Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada c Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Laboratory (PAMI), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada Abstract The principal contribution of this work is to design a general framework for an intelligent system to extract one object of interest from ultrasound images. This system is based on reinforcement learning. The input image is divided into several sub-images, and the proposed system finds the appropriate local values for each of them so that it can extract the object of interest. The agent uses some images and their ground-truth (manually segmented) version to learn from. A reward function is employed to measure the similarities between the output and the manually segmented images, and to provide feedback to the agent. The information obtained can be used as valuable knowledge stored in the Q-matrix. The agent can then use this knowledge for new input images. The experimental results for prostate segmentation in trans-rectal ultrasound images show high p