This paper presents an approach for fully automatic segmentation of MS lesions in fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. The proposed method estimates a gaussian mixture model with three kernels as cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), normal tissue and Multiple Sclerosis lesions. To estimate this model, an automatic Entropy based EM algorithm is used to find the best estimated Model. Then, Markov random field (MRF) model and EM algorithm are utilized to obtain and upgrade the class conditional probability density function and the apriori probability of each class. After estimation of Model parameters and apriori probability, brain tissues are classified using bayesian classification. To evaluate the result of the proposed method, similarity criteria of different slices related to 20 MS patients are calculated and compared with other methods which include manual segmentation. Also, volume of segmented lesions are computed and compared with gold standard using correlation coefficient. The proposed method has better performance in comparison with previous works which are reported here

In the last years, digital image processing and analysis are used for computer assisted evaluation of semen quality with therapeutic goals or to estimate its fertility by means of spermatozoid motility and morphology. Sperm morphology is assessed routinely as part of standard laboratory analysis in the diagnosis of human male infertility. Nowadays assessments of sperm morphology are mostly done based on subjective criteria. In order to avoid subjectivity, numerous studies that incorporate image analysis techniques in the assessment of sperm morphology have been proposed. The primary step of all these methods is segmentation of sperm’s parts. In this paper, we have proposed a new method for segmentation of sperm’s Acrosome, Nucleus, Mid-piece and identification of sperm’s tail through some points which are placed on the sperm’s tail, accurately. These estimated points could be used to verify the morphological characteristics of sperm’s tail such as length, shape and etc. At first, sperm’s Acrosome, Nucleus and Mid-piece are segmented through a method based on a Bayesian classifier which utilizes the entropy based expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm and Markov random field (MRF) model to obtain and upgrade the class conditional probability density function (CCPDF) and the <i>apriori</i> probability of each class. Then, a pixel at the end of sperm’s Mid-piece, is selected as an initial point. To find other pixels which are placed on the sperm’s tail, structural similarity index (SSIM) is used in an iterative scheme. In order to stop the algorithm automatically at the end of sperm’s tail, local entropy is estimated and used as a feature to determine if a point is located on the sperm’s tail or not. To compare the performance of the proposed approach with those of previous approaches including manual segmentation, the Accuracy, Sensitivity and Specificity were calculated

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In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the parameters of Gaussian mixture models. Although the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm yields the maximum-likelihood (ML) solution, its sensitivity to the selection of the starting parameters is well-known and it may converge to the boundary of the parameter space. Furthermore, the resulting mixture depends on the number of selected components, but the optimal number of kernels may be unknown beforehand. We introduce the use of the entropy of the probability density function (pdf) associated to each kernel to measure the quality of a given mixture model with a fixed number of kernels. We propose two methods to approximate the entropy of each kernel and a modification of the classical EM algorithm in order to find the optimum number of components of the mixture. Moreover, we use two stopping criteria: a novel global mixture entropy-based criterion called Gaussianity deficiency (GD) and a minimum description length (MDL) principle-based one. Our algorithm, called entropy-based EM (EBEM), starts with a unique kernel and performs only splitting by selecting the worst kernel attending to GD. We have successfully tested it in probability density estimation, pattern classification, and color image segmentation. Experimental results improve the ones of other state-of-the-art model order selection methods.