Interactive 3D heart chamber partitioning with a new marker-controlled watershed algorithm

Abstract

Watershed transform has been widely used in medical image segmentation. One fundamental problem with it is over-segmentation. There are mainly two approaches to deal with this problem: hierarchical segmentation and segmentation with markers. The markers, either automatically extracted or interactively generated, are mostly used in the homotopy modification of morphological gradients prior to the watershed segmentation. Most of the current techniques does not incorporate domain knowledge of the data. In this paper, we propose a two-step marker-controlled watershed segmentation algorithm with simple domain knowledge incorporated: (1) Modified image foresting transform (IFT) algorithm is used to produce the initial segmentation; (2) The marker-controlled watershed region merging process is incorporated with domain knowledge. A min-cut criterion for region merging is proposed. This approach is effectively applied to the interactive 3D heart chamber partitioning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.