Automatic 3-D kidney segmentation based on shape constrained GC-OAAM

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 — Poster Session III
10:00 a.m. – Noon	Natcher Conference Center	CC	IMAG-7

Authors

• X Chen
• R Summers
• J Yao

Abstract

Accurate and efficient segmentation of kidney into different tissue types plays a very important role in clinical research. In this paper, we propose an automatic 3-D kidney segmentation method which segments the kidney into the three different tissue types: renal cortex, medulla and pelvis. The proposed method synergistically combines active appearance model (AAM), live wire (LW) and graph cut (GC) methods, GC-OAAM for short. Our method consists of two main steps. First, a pseudo 3-D segmentation method is employed for kidney initialization in which the segmentation is performed slice-by-slice via a multi-object oriented active appearance model (OAAM) method. An improved iterative model refinement algorithm is proposed for the AAM optimization, which synergistically combines the AAM and LW method. Multi-object strategy is applied to help the object initialization. The 3-D model constraints are applied to the initialization result. Second, the object shape information generated from the initialization step is integrated into the GC cost computation. A multi-label GC method is used to segment the kidney into cortex, medulla and pelvis. The proposed method was tested on 19 clinical arterial phase CT data sets. The preliminary results showed the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.

back to top