title: A combinatorial Bayesian and Dirichlet model for prostate MR image segmentation using probabilistic image features.
abstract: Blurred boundaries and heterogeneous intensities make accurate prostate MR image segmentation problematic. To improve prostate MR image segmentation we suggest an approach that includes: (a) an image patch division method to partition the prostate into homogeneous segments for feature extraction; (b) an image feature formulation and classification method, using the relevance vector machine, to provide probabilistic prior knowledge for graph energy construction; (c) a graph energy formulation scheme with Bayesian priors and Dirichlet graph energy and (d) a non-iterative graph energy minimization scheme, based on matrix differentiation, to perform the probabilistic pixel membership optimization. The segmentation output was obtained by assigning pixels with foreground and background labels based on derived membership probabilities. We evaluated our approach on the PROMISE-12 dataset with 50 prostate MR image volumes. Our approach achieved a mean dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.90  ±  0.02, which surpassed the five best prior-based methods in the PROMISE-12 segmentation challenge.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical and Multimedia Information Technology Research Group, School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
authors.forename: Ang
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Changyang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Xiuying
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Eberl
authors.forename: Dagan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fulham
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011467:Prostate / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*