Abstract
Automated segmentation of the esophagus in CT images is of high value to radiologists for oncological examinations of the mediastinum. It can serve as a guideline and prevent confusion with pathological tissue. However, segmentation is a challenging problem due to low contrast and versatile appearance of the esophagus. In this paper, a two step method is proposed which first finds the approximate shape using a “detect and connect” approach. A classifier is trained to find short segments of the esophagus which are approximated by an elliptical model. Recently developed techniques in discriminative learning and pruning of the search space enable a rapid detection of possible esophagus segments. Prior shape knowledge of the complete esophagus is modeled using a Markov chain framework, which allows efficient inferrence of the approximate shape from the detected candidate segments. In a refinement step, the surface of the detected shape is non-rigidly deformed to better fit the organ boundaries. In contrast to previously proposed methods, no user interaction is required. It was evaluated on 117 datasets and achieves a mean segmentation error of 2.28mm with less than 9s computation time.
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Feulner, J., Zhou, S.K., Cavallaro, A., Seifert, S., Hornegger, J., Comaniciu, D. (2009). Fast Automatic Segmentation of the Esophagus from 3D CT Data Using a Probabilistic Model. In: Yang, GZ., Hawkes, D., Rueckert, D., Noble, A., Taylor, C. (eds) Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2009. MICCAI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5761. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04268-3_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04268-3_32
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