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A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions
BACKGROUND: Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures in medical images is a critical step in the development of computer assisted intervention systems. However, complex image conditions, such as intensity inhomogeneity, noise and weak object boundary, often cause considerable difficulties in m...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2016
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4831199/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27074891 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12938-016-0153-6 |
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author | Wang, Kuanquan Ma, Chao |
author_facet | Wang, Kuanquan Ma, Chao |
author_sort | Wang, Kuanquan |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures in medical images is a critical step in the development of computer assisted intervention systems. However, complex image conditions, such as intensity inhomogeneity, noise and weak object boundary, often cause considerable difficulties in medical image segmentation. To cope with these difficulties, we propose a novel robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour framework, to extract desired object boundary from magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) imagery in 3D. METHODS: We define an energy functional in terms of the initial seeded labels and two fitting functions that are derived from object local robust statistics features. This energy is then incorporated into a level set scheme which drives the active contour evolving and converging at the desired position of the object boundary. Due to the local robust statistics and the volume scaling function in the energy fitting term, the object features in local volumes are learned adaptively to guide the motion of the contours, which thereby guarantees the capability of our method to cope with intensity inhomogeneity, noise and weak boundary. In addition, the initialization of active contour is simplified by select several seeds in the object and/or background to eliminate the sensitivity to initialization. RESULTS: The proposed method was applied to extensive public available volumetric medical images with challenging image conditions. The segmentation results of various anatomical structures, such as white matter (WM), atrium, caudate nucleus and brain tumor, were evaluated quantitatively by comparing with the corresponding ground truths. It was found that the proposed method achieves consistent and coherent segmentation accuracy of 0.9246 ± 0.0068 for WM, 0.9043 ± 0.0131 for liver tumors, 0.8725 ± 0.0374 for caudate nucleus, 0.8802 ± 0.0595 for brain tumors, etc., measured by Dice similarity coefficients value for the overlap between the algorithm one and the ground truth. Further comparative experimental results showed desirable performances of the proposed method over several well-known segmentation methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. CONCLUSION: We proposed an approach to accurate segment volumetric medical images with complex conditions. The accuracy of segmentation, robustness to noise and contour initialization were validated on the basis of extensive MR and CT volumes. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4831199 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2016 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-48311992016-04-15 A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions Wang, Kuanquan Ma, Chao Biomed Eng Online Research BACKGROUND: Accurate segmentation of anatomical structures in medical images is a critical step in the development of computer assisted intervention systems. However, complex image conditions, such as intensity inhomogeneity, noise and weak object boundary, often cause considerable difficulties in medical image segmentation. To cope with these difficulties, we propose a novel robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour framework, to extract desired object boundary from magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) imagery in 3D. METHODS: We define an energy functional in terms of the initial seeded labels and two fitting functions that are derived from object local robust statistics features. This energy is then incorporated into a level set scheme which drives the active contour evolving and converging at the desired position of the object boundary. Due to the local robust statistics and the volume scaling function in the energy fitting term, the object features in local volumes are learned adaptively to guide the motion of the contours, which thereby guarantees the capability of our method to cope with intensity inhomogeneity, noise and weak boundary. In addition, the initialization of active contour is simplified by select several seeds in the object and/or background to eliminate the sensitivity to initialization. RESULTS: The proposed method was applied to extensive public available volumetric medical images with challenging image conditions. The segmentation results of various anatomical structures, such as white matter (WM), atrium, caudate nucleus and brain tumor, were evaluated quantitatively by comparing with the corresponding ground truths. It was found that the proposed method achieves consistent and coherent segmentation accuracy of 0.9246 ± 0.0068 for WM, 0.9043 ± 0.0131 for liver tumors, 0.8725 ± 0.0374 for caudate nucleus, 0.8802 ± 0.0595 for brain tumors, etc., measured by Dice similarity coefficients value for the overlap between the algorithm one and the ground truth. Further comparative experimental results showed desirable performances of the proposed method over several well-known segmentation methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. CONCLUSION: We proposed an approach to accurate segment volumetric medical images with complex conditions. The accuracy of segmentation, robustness to noise and contour initialization were validated on the basis of extensive MR and CT volumes. BioMed Central 2016-04-14 /pmc/articles/PMC4831199/ /pubmed/27074891 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12938-016-0153-6 Text en © Wang and Ma. 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Wang, Kuanquan Ma, Chao A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
title | A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
title_full | A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
title_fullStr | A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
title_full_unstemmed | A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
title_short | A robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
title_sort | robust statistics driven volume-scalable active contour for segmenting anatomical structures in volumetric medical images with complex conditions |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4831199/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27074891 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12938-016-0153-6 |
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