Program Information
Automated Segmentation of Head-And-Neck CT Images for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning Via Multi-Atlas Machine Learning (MAML)
X Ren1*, G Sharp2, H Gao3, (1) Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, Shanghai, (2) Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, (3) Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, Shanghai
Presentations
SU-C-BRA-4 (Sunday, July 31, 2016) 1:00 PM - 1:55 PM Room: Ballroom A
Purpose:Accurate image segmentation is a crucial step during image guided radiation therapy. This work proposes multi-atlas machine learning (MAML) algorithm for automated segmentation of head-and-neck CT images.
Methods:As the first step, the algorithm utilizes normalized mutual information as similarity metric, affine registration combined with multiresolution B-Spline registration, and then fuses together using the label fusion strategy via Plastimatch. As the second step, the following feature selection strategy is proposed to extract five feature components from reference or atlas images: intensity (I), distance map (D), box (B), center of gravity (C) and stable point (S). The box feature B is novel. It describes a relative position from each point to minimum inscribed rectangle of ROI. The center-of-gravity feature C is the 3D Euclidean distance from a sample point to the ROI center of gravity, and then S is the distance of the sample point to the landmarks. Then, we adopt random forest (RF) in Scikit-learn, a Python module integrating a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms as classifier. Different feature and atlas strategies are used for different ROIs for improved performance, such as multi-atlas strategy with reference box for brainstem, and single-atlas strategy with reference landmark for optic chiasm.
Results:The algorithm was validated on a set of 33 CT images with manual contours using a leave-one-out cross-validation strategy. Dice similarity coefficients between manual contours and automated contours were calculated: the proposed MAML method had an improvement from 0.79 to 0.83 for brainstem and 0.11 to 0.52 for optic chiasm with respect to multi-atlas segmentation method (MA).
Conclusion:A MAML method has been proposed for automated segmentation of head-and-neck CT images with improved performance. It provides the comparable result in brainstem and the improved result in optic chiasm compared with MA.
Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: Xuhua Ren and Hao Gao were partially supported by the NSFC (#11405105), the 973 Program (#2015CB856000), and the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program (#14PJ1404500).
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