Dependency prior for multi-atlas label fusion

Multi-atlas label fusion has been widely applied in medical image analysis. To reduce the bias in label fusion, we proposed a joint label fusion technique to reduce correlated errors produced by different atlases via considering the pair-wise dependencies between them. Using image similarities from image patches to estimate the pairwise dependencies, we showed promising performance. To address the unreliability in purely using local image similarity for dependency estimation, we propose to improve the accuracy of the estimated dependencies by including empirical knowledge, which is learned from the atlases in a leave-one-out strategy. We apply the new technique to segment the hippocampus from MRI and show significant improvement over our initial results.