A representation and classification scheme for tree-like structures in medical images : Analyzing the branching pattern of ductal trees in x-ray galactograms
We propose a multistep approach for representing and classifying tree-like structures in medical images. Tree-like structures are frequently encountered in biomedical contexts; examples are the bronchial system, the vascular topology, and the breast ductal network. We use tree encoding techniques, such as the depth-first string encoding and the Prüfer encoding, to obtain a symbolic string represen