Atlas propagation through template selection

Abstract

Template-based atlas propagation can reduce registration cost in multi-atlas segmentation. In this method, atlases and testing images are registered to a common template. We show that using a common template may be suboptimal for reducing atlas propagation errors. Instead, we propose to apply a custom selected template for each testing image by employing a large template library and a fast template selection technique. The proposed method significantly outperforms common template based atlas propagation. Using a template library with 50 images, our method produced comparable results to standard direct registration-based multi-atlas segmentation with a small fraction of registration cost.