Automatic labeling and classification of brain CT images

Abstract

Automatic medical image classification is difficult because of the lacking of training data. As manual labeling is too costly, we provide an automatic labeling solution to this problem by making use of the radiology report associated with the medical images. We first segment and reconstruct the 3D regions of interest (ROIs) from the medical images, and extract pathology and anatomy information from the associated report. We use an anatomical atlas to map the ROIs to the anatomy part(s) and match the pathology information of the same anatomy part(s) from the text. In this way, the ROIs are automatically labeled with pathology types which can be served as class labels, and a training data set of a large number of training instances is generated automatically. We extract the volume, color, location, and shape features of the ROIs, and classify the types of ROIs using these features. The overall evaluation result is promising to doctors and medical professionals. Our experiment is conducted using traumatic brain injury CT images; however, our framework of automatically labeling and classifying medical cases can be extended to medical images in other modality or of other anatomical part. © 2011 IEEE.