Shao Yeqin, Gao Yaozong, Wang Qian, Yang Xin, Shen Dinggang
Institute of Image Processing & Pattern Recognition, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China; Nantong University, Jiangsu 226019, China.
Department of Radiology and BRIC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, United States; Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599, United States.
Med Image Anal. 2015 Dec;26(1):345-56. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2015.06.007. Epub 2015 Oct 2.
Automatic and accurate segmentation of the prostate and rectum in planning CT images is a challenging task due to low image contrast, unpredictable organ (relative) position, and uncertain existence of bowel gas across different patients. Recently, regression forest was adopted for organ deformable segmentation on 2D medical images by training one landmark detector for each point on the shape model. However, it seems impractical for regression forest to guide 3D deformable segmentation as a landmark detector, due to large number of vertices in the 3D shape model as well as the difficulty in building accurate 3D vertex correspondence for each landmark detector. In this paper, we propose a novel boundary detection method by exploiting the power of regression forest for prostate and rectum segmentation. The contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) we introduce regression forest as a local boundary regressor to vote the entire boundary of a target organ, which avoids training a large number of landmark detectors and building an accurate 3D vertex correspondence for each landmark detector; (2) an auto-context model is integrated with regression forest to improve the accuracy of the boundary regression; (3) we further combine a deformable segmentation method with the proposed local boundary regressor for the final organ segmentation by integrating organ shape priors. Our method is evaluated on a planning CT image dataset with 70 images from 70 different patients. The experimental results show that our proposed boundary regression method outperforms the conventional boundary classification method in guiding the deformable model for prostate and rectum segmentations. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, our method also shows a competitive performance.
在计划CT图像中对前列腺和直肠进行自动且准确的分割是一项具有挑战性的任务,这是由于图像对比度低、器官(相对)位置不可预测以及不同患者肠道气体的存在情况不确定。最近,通过为形状模型上的每个点训练一个地标检测器,回归森林被用于二维医学图像的器官可变形分割。然而,由于三维形状模型中的顶点数量众多,以及为每个地标检测器建立精确的三维顶点对应关系存在困难,使用回归森林作为地标检测器来指导三维可变形分割似乎不切实际。在本文中,我们提出了一种新颖的边界检测方法,利用回归森林的能力进行前列腺和直肠分割。本文的贡献如下:(1)我们引入回归森林作为局部边界回归器,对目标器官的整个边界进行投票,这避免了训练大量地标检测器以及为每个地标检测器建立精确的三维顶点对应关系;(2)将自动上下文模型与回归森林相结合,以提高边界回归的准确性;(3)我们通过整合器官形状先验,进一步将可变形分割方法与所提出的局部边界回归器相结合,用于最终的器官分割。我们的方法在一个包含来自70名不同患者的70幅图像的计划CT图像数据集上进行了评估。实验结果表明,我们提出的边界回归方法在指导前列腺和直肠分割的可变形模型方面优于传统的边界分类方法。与其他当前最先进的方法相比,我们的方法也表现出了有竞争力的性能。