Multi atlas-based segmentation with data driven refinement

Anatomical structure segmentation is the basis for further image analysis processes. Although there are many available segmentation methods there is still the need to improve the accuracy and speed of them to be used in a clinical environment. The VISCERAL project organizes a benchmark to compare approaches for organ segmentation in big data. A fully-automatic segmentation method using the VISCERAL data set is proposed in this paper. It incorporates both the local contrast of the image using an intensity feature as well as atlas probabilistic information to compute the definite labelling of the structure of interest. The usefulness of the new intensity feature is evaluated using contrast-enhanced CT images of the trunk. An overall average increase is computed in the overlap of the segmentations with an improvement of up to 33% for several anatomical structures when compared to only using an atlas based segmentation method. Qualitative results are also shown for MR images supporting the inclusion of this contrast feature in atlas-based segmentation methods for several modalities.