Multi-atlas segmentation and landmark localization in images with large field of view

Abstract

In this work, we present multi-atlas based techniques for both segmentation and landmark detection in images with large fieldof- view (FOV). Such images can provide important insight in the anatomical structure of the human body, but are challenging to deal with since the localization search space for landmarks and organs, in addition to the raw amount of data, is large. In many studies, segmentation and localization techniques are developed specifically for an individual target anatomy or image modality. This can leave a substantial amount of the potential of large FOV images untapped, as the co-localization and shape variability of organs are neglected. We thus focus on modality and anatomy independent techniques to be applied to a wide range of input images. For segmentation, we propagate the multi-organ label maps from several atlases to a target image via a large FOV Markov random field (MRF) based non-rigid registration method. The propagated labels are then fused in the target domain using similarity-weighted majority voting. For landmark localization, we use a consensus based fusion of location estimates from several atlases identified by a template-matching approach. We present our results in the IEEE ISBI 2014 VISCERAL challenge as well as VISCERAL Anatomy1 and Anatomy2 benchmarks.