First-order kernel density estimation of abdomen medical image intensity and spatial information and application to segmentation

Kernel density estimators (KDE) used for many medical image applications only consider the intensity information of each pixel or its neighbors without the ability of expressing the structure and shape of tissues and organs, and they suffer from boundary bias problem. In this paper, we propose a new first-order kernel density estimation (FOKDE) method for 1D intensity information and 2D spatial information of medical image in two steps. First, the FOKDE of intensity information is estimated and applied to medical image segmentation with the multi-thresholding algorithm. Second, we estimate the FOKDE of spatial information on the initial segmentation, which can express the structure and shape of organs and tissues. In order to evaluate the FOKDE and KDE of the 2D spatial information, we apply them to medical image segmentation with the hill-climbing strategy. Density estimation experiments and segmentation application results on the simulated dataset and real abdomen CT images show us that the FOKDE has smaller boundary bias than the KDE, and that it can estimate the structure and shape of tissues and organs with spatial information effectively.