A Collaborative Dictionary Learning Model for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation on Multimodalities MR Sequences

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is the most common malignant tumor of the nasopharynx. The delicate nature of the nasopharyngeal structures means that noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the preferred diagnostic technique for NPC. However, NPC is a typically infiltrative tumor, usually with a small volume, and thus, it remains challenging to discriminate it from tightly connected surrounding tissues. To address this issue, this study proposes a voxel-wise discriminate method for locating and segmenting NPC from normal tissues in MRI sequences. The located NPC is refined to obtain its accurate segmentation results by an original multiviewed collaborative dictionary classification (CODL) model. The proposed CODL reconstructs a latent intact space and equips it with discriminative power for the collective multiview analysis task. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate that CODL is capable of finding a discriminative space for multiview orthogonal data. We then evaluated the method on real NPC. Experimental results show that CODL could accurately discriminate and localize NPCs of different volumes. This method achieved superior performances in segmenting NPC compared with benchmark methods. Robust segmentation results show that CODL can effectively assist clinicians in locating NPC.