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ImFEATbox: a toolbox for extraction and analysis of medical image features

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

In medical imaging, the digital post-processing and analysis of acquired images has become an important research field. Topics include various applications of image processing and machine learning aiming to assist radiologists in their diagnostic work. A crucial step in successfully implementing such systems is finding appropriate mathematical descriptions to reflect characteristics of acquired images. Which features are the most meaningful ones strongly depends on the underlying scientific/diagnostic question and the image itself. This makes researching, implementing and testing features time-consuming and cost-intensive. In our work, we aim to address this issue by creating ImFEATbox, a publicly available toolbox to extract and analyze image features for a wide range of applications.

Methods

To reduce the amount of time spent for choosing the right features, we provide an assortment of feature extraction algorithms which are suitable for a broad variety of medical image processing problems. The toolbox includes both global and local features as well as feature descriptors. While being primarily developed in MATLAB, the majority of our algorithms is also available in Python to enable access to a wider range of researchers.

Results

We tested the applicability of ImFEATbox on an FDG-PET/CT data set of 12 patients diagnosed with lung cancer and an MRI data set of 50 patients with prostate lesions. Employing the implemented algorithms in an exemplary manner, we are able to demonstrate its potential for different scientific problems, e.g., show differences between features, indicate redundancies in extracted feature sets by means of a correlation analysis and training a SVM to distinguish between high-risk and low-risk prostate lesions.

Conclusion

ImFEATbox provides a variety of feature extraction algorithms suitable for a large number of post-processing and analysis applications in medical imaging. The toolbox is publicly available and can thus be beneficial to a wide range of researchers working on medical image analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, University Hospital of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Annika Liebgott, Thomas Küstner, Tobias Hepp, Petros Martirosian, Fabian Bamberg, Konstantin Nikolaou & Sergios Gatidis

  2. Institute of Signal Processing and System Theory, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Annika Liebgott, Thomas Küstner, Heiko Strohmeier, Philipp Mangold & Bin Yang

  3. School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, Kings College London, St. Thomas Hospital, London, UK

    Thomas Küstner

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  1. Annika Liebgott
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Correspondence to Thomas Küstner.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Research involving human participants and/or animals

Formal approval was waived by the local ethics committee due to the retrospective nature of this analysis. This article does not contain any studies with animals.

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All patients had given their written informed consent for the conductance of respective imaging studies.

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Liebgott, A., Küstner, T., Strohmeier, H. et al. ImFEATbox: a toolbox for extraction and analysis of medical image features. Int J CARS 13, 1881–1893 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1859-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1859-7

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