Partial Differential Equations-Based Segmentation for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning
2005
The purpose of this study is to develop automatic algorithms for the segmentation phase of radiotherapy treatment
planning. We develop new image processing techniques that are based on solving a partial differential equation for the
evolution of the curve that identifies the segmented organ. The velocity function is based on the piecewise
Mumford-Shah functional. Our method incorporates information about the target organ into classical segmentation
algorithms. This information, which is given in terms of a three-dimensional wireframe representation of the organ,
serves as an initial guess for the segmentation algorithm. We check the performance of the new algorithm on eight data
sets of three different organs: rectum, bladder, and kidney. The results of the automatic segmentation were compared
with a manual segmentation of each data set by radiation oncology faculty and residents. The quality of the automatic
segmentation was measured with the ''$\kappa$-statistics'', and with a count of over- and undersegmented frames, and
was shown in most cases to be very close to the manual segmentation of the same data. A typical segmentation of an
organ with sixty slices takes less than ten seconds on a Pentium IV laptop.
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