Prostate segmentation by sparse representation based classification.

Accurate segmentation of prostate in CT images is important in image-guided radiotherapy. However, it is difficult to localize the prostate in CT images due to low image contrast, unpredicted motion and large appearance variations across different treatment days. To address these issues, we propose a sparse representation based classification method to accurately segment the prostate. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) A discriminant dictionary learning technique is proposed to overcome the limitation of the traditional Sparse Representation based classifier (SRC). (2) Context features are incorporated into SRC to refine the prostate boundary in an iterative scheme. (3) A residue-based linear regression model is trained to increase the classification performance of SRC and extend it from hard classification to soft classification. To segment the prostate, the new treatment image is first rigidly aligned to the planning image space based on the pelvic bones. Then two sets of location-adaptive SRCs along two coordinate directions are applied on the aligned treatment image to produce a probability map, based on which all previously segmented images of the same patient are rigidly aligned onto the new treatment image and majority voting strategy is further adopted to finally segment the prostate in the new treatment image. The proposed method has been evaluated on a CT dataset consisting of 15 patients and 230 CT images. Promising results have been achieved.