A spatiotemporal-based scheme for efficient registration-based segmentation of thoracic 4-D MRI.
Dynamic three-dimensional (3-D) (four-dimensional, 4-D) magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is gaining importance in the study of pulmonary motion for respiratory diseases and pulmonary tumor motion for radiotherapy. To perform quantitative analysis using 4-D MR images, segmentation of anatomical structures such as the lung and pulmonary tumor is required. Manual segmentation of entire thoracic 4-D MRI data that typically contains many 3-D volumes acquired over several breathing cycles is extremely tedious, time consuming, and suffers high user variability. This requires the development of new automated segmentation schemes for 4-D MRI data segmentation. Registration-based segmentation technique that uses automatic registration methods for segmentation has been shown to be an accurate method to segment structures for 4-D data series. However, directly applying registration-based segmentation to segment 4-D MRI series lacks efficiency. Here we propose an automated 4-D registration-based segmentation scheme that is based on spatiotemporal information for the segmentation of thoracic 4-D MR lung images. The proposed scheme saved up to 95% of computation amount while achieving comparable accurate segmentations compared to directly applying registration-based segmentation to 4-D dataset. The scheme facilitates rapid 3-D/4-D visualization of the lung and tumor motion and potentially the tracking of tumor during radiation delivery.
Y
Y
Yang
E
E
Van Reeth
C L
CL
Poh
C H
CH
Tan
I W K
IW
Tham
D016022:Case-Control Studies; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D013909:Thorax / Q000473:pathology