title: A non-parametric segmentation methodology for oral videocapillaroscopic images.
abstract: We aim to describe a new non-parametric methodology to support the clinician during the diagnostic process of oral videocapillaroscopy to evaluate peripheral microcirculation. Our methodology, mainly based on wavelet analysis and mathematical morphology to preprocess the images, segments them by minimizing the within-class luminosity variance of both capillaries and background. Experiments were carried out on a set of real microphotographs to validate this approach versus handmade segmentations provided by physicians. By using a leave-one-patient-out approach, we pointed out that our methodology is robust, according to precision-recall criteria (average precision and recall are equal to 0.924 and 0.923, respectively) and it acts as a physician in terms of the Jaccard index (mean and standard deviation equal to 0.858 and 0.064, respectively).
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: fbellavia@math.unipa.it.
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Bellavia
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze Stomatologiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: cacioppo@odonto.unipa.it.
authors.forename: Antonino
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cacioppo
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: lupascu@math.unipa.it.
authors.forename: Carmen Alina
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Lupaşcu
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze Stomatologiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: messina@odonto.unipa.it.
authors.forename: Pietro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Messina
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze Stomatologiche, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: scardina@odonto.unipa.it.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Scardina
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: domenico.tegolo@unipa.it.
authors.forename: Domenico
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Tegolo
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy. Electronic address: cesare.valenti@unipa.it.
authors.forename: Cesare
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Valenti
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002196:Capillaries; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008833:Microcirculation; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009055:Mouth / Q000098:blood supply; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D058067:Wavelet Analysis
keywords: Leave-one-out cross-validation; Mathematical morphology; Non-parametric image segmentation; Oral videocapillaroscopy; Wavelet analysis