Unsupervised learning methods in X-ray spectral imaging material segmentation

In this work, we have investigated a number of unsupervised learning methods for material segmentation in projection x-ray imaging with a spectral detector. A phantom containing two hard materials (glass, steel) and three soft materials (PVC, polypropylene, and PFTE) all embedded in PMMA was imaged with a 5 energy bin spectal detector. The projection images were utilized to test nine unsupervised learning algorithms for automated material segmentation. Each algorithm was investigated using single energy (SE), dual energy (DE) and multi energy (ME) images. Clustering results were scored based on homogeneity and completeness of the clusters, which were combined into the Rosenberg and Hirshberg's V-measure. Principle component analysis (PCA), independent component analysis (ICA), and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) were tested as dimensional reduction methods. ME, DE and SE material segmentation was performed using five, two, and single energy images, respectively. ME had the highest V-measure on the soft materials using PCA and a novel interpolating bayesian gaussian mixture model (BGMM) clustering with a V-measure of 0.71. This was by 3.5% better than DE and 20.3% better than SE. Conversely, SE imaging was most capable of hard tissue segmentation using the standard BGMM, with a V-measures of 0.84. This was 6.3% better than DE and 5.0% better than ME. This work demonstrated that ME x-ray imaging might be superior in segmenting soft tissues compared to conventional SE x-ray imaging.