title: Interactive live-wire boundary extraction.
abstract: Live-wire segmentation is a new interactive tool for efficient, accurate and reproducible boundary extraction which requires minimal user input with a mouse. Optimal boundaries are computed and selected at interactive rates as the user moves the mouse starting from a manually specified seed point. When the mouse position comes into the proximity of an object edge, a 'live-wire' boundary snaps to, and wraps around the object of interest. The input of a new seed point 'freezes' the selected boundary segment and the process is repeated until the boundary is complete. Two novel enhancements to the basic live-wire methodology include boundary cooling and on-the-fly training. Data-driven boundary cooling generates seed points automatically and further reduces user input. On-the-fly training adapts the dynamic boundary to edges of current interest. Using the live-wire technique, boundaries are extracted in one-fifth of the time required for manual tracing, but with 4.4 times greater accuracy and 4.8 times greater reproducibility. In particular, interobserver reproducibility using the live-wire tool is 3.8 times greater than intraobserver reproducibility using manual tracing.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA. barrett@cs.byu.edu
authors.forename: W A
authors.initials: WA
authors.lastname: Barrett
authors.forename: E N
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Mortensen
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003331:Coronary Vessels / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D006352:Heart Ventricles / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D006801:Humans; D007866:Leg / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D015588:Observer Variation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013131:Spine / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D014584:User-Computer Interface