In dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI), segmentation of internal kidney structures is essential for functional evaluation. Manual morphological segmentation of cortex, medulla and cavities remains difficult and time-consuming especially because the different renal compartments are hard to distinguish on a single image. We propose to test a semi-automated method to segment internal kidney structures from a DCE-MRI registered sequence. As the temporal intensity evolution is different in each of the three kidney compartments, pixels are sorted according to their time-intensity curves using a k-means partitioning algorithm. No ground truth is available to evaluate resulting segmentations so a manual segmentation by a radiologist is chosen as a reference. We first evaluate some similarity criteria between the functional segmentations and this reference. The same measures are then computed between another manual segmentation and the reference. Results are similar for the two types of comparisons.

International audienceIn dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging, segmentation of internal kidney structures like cortex, medulla and cavities is essential for functional assessment. To avoid fastidious and time-consuming manual segmentation, semi-automatic methods have been recently developed. Some of them use the differences between temporal contrast evolution in each anatomical region to perform functional segmentation. We test two methods where pixels are classified according to their time-intensity evolution. They both require a vector quantization stage with some unsupervised learning algorithm (K-means or Growing Neural Gas with targeting). Three or more classes are thus obtained. In the first case the method is completely automatic. In the second case, a restricted intervention by an observer is required for merging. As no ground truth is available for result evaluation, a manual anatomical segmentation is considered as a reference. Some discrepancy criteria like overlap, extra pixels and similarity index are computed between this segmentation and a functional one. The same criteria are also evaluated between the reference and another manual segmentation. Results are comparable for the two types of comparisons, proving that anatomical segmentation can be performed using functional information

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International audienceThe identification of phytoplankton is currently an important issue to prevent the aquatic environment. The growth of one or several phytoplankton species can lead to hyper eutrophication and causes lethal consequences on other organisms. In this paper, the selective recognition of invading species is investigated by automatic recognition algorithms of optical and fluorescence imaging. Firstly, morphological characteristics of algae of microscopic imaging are treated. The image processing lead to the identification the genus of aquatic organisms and compared to a morphologic data base. Secondly, fluorescence images allow an automatic recognition based on multispectral data that identify locally the ratio of different photosynthetic pigments and gives a unique finger print of algae. It is shown that the combination of both methods are useful in the recognition of aquatic organisms