Topological correction of subcortical segmentation

Abstract

We propose a method for automatically correcting the spherical topology of any segmentation under any digital connectivity. A multiple region growing process, concurrently acting on the foreground and the background, divides the segmentation into connected components and successive minimum cost decisions guarantee convergence to correct spherical topology. In contrast to existing procedures that suppose specific initial segmentation (full connectivity, no cavities...) and are designed for a particular task (cortical representation), no assumption is made on the initial image. Our method applied to subcortical segmentations allows us to correct the topology of fourteen non-cortical structures in less than a minute.