Robust Retinal Vessel Segmentation using ELM and SVM Classifier

The diagnosis of retinal blood vessels is of much clinical importance, as they are generally examined to evaluate and monitor both the ophthalmological diseases and the non-retinal diseases. The vascular nature of retinal is very complex and the manual segmentation process is tedious. It requires more time and skill. In this paper, a novel supervised approach using Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) classifier and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is proposed to segment the retinal blood vessel. This approach calculates 7-D feature vector comprises of green channel intensity, Median-Local Binary Pattern (M-LBP), Stroke Width Transform (SWT) response, Weber�s Local Descriptor (WLD) measure, Frangi�s vesselness measure, Laplacian Of Gaussian (LOG) filter response and morphological bottom-hat transform. This 7-D vector is given as input to the ELM classifier to classify each pixel as vessel or non-vessel. The primary vessel map from the ELM classifier is combined with the ridges detected from the enhanced bottom-hat transformed image. Then the high-level features computed from the combined image are used for final classification using SVM. The performance of this technique was evaluated on the publically available databases like DRIVE, STARE and CHASE-DB1. The result demonstrates that the proposed approach is very fast and achieves high accuracy about 96.1% , 94.4% and 94.5% for DRIVE, STARE and CHASE-DB1 respectively

Neuroimaging Patterns of Central Nervous System Metastases in Neuroblastoma: Report of 2 Recent Cases and Literature Review

The authors describe imaging patterns of intracranial metastases in 2 children with grade 4 neuroblastoma. Central nervous system metastases from neuroblastoma are extremely rare and may involve the cerebral parenchyma, leptomeninges, or dura. Cerebral parenchymal metastases can be cystic with mural nodules or solid with hemorrhagic elements. The first patient in our study had multiple cystic parenchymal metastases with calcific mural nodules, while the second patient developed solid hemorrhagic parenchymal metastatic lesions along with extensive leptomeningeal and dural deposits. Central nervous system involvement in both patients occurred within a time span ranging from 12 to 14 months from the time of initial diagnosis. </jats:p