Segmentation of Head and Neck Lymph Node Regions for Radiotherapy Planning Using Active Contour-Based Atlas Registration

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in signal processing Vol. 3; no. 1; pp. 135 - 147
• Main Authors: Gorthi, S., Duay, V., Houhou, N., Bach Cuadra, M., Schick, U., Becker, M., Allal, A.S., Thiran, J.-P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2009; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Atlas-based segmentation; Boundaries; Breast cancer; Cancer; Computed tomography; Educational institutions; Head; head and neck; Image segmentation; IMRT; Lymph; lymph node regions; Lymph nodes; Lymphatic system; Mathematical models; Neck; Necks; Neoplasms; non-rigid registration; Process planning; radiotherapy; Robustness; Segmentation; Shape
• ISSN: 1932-4553; 1941-0484
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTSP.2008.2011104

In this paper, we present the segmentation of the head and neck lymph node regions using a new active contour-based atlas registration model. We propose to segment the lymph node regions without directly including them in the atlas registration process; instead, they are segmented using the dense deformation field computed from the registration of the atlas structures with distinct boundaries. This approach results in robust and accurate segmentation of the lymph node regions even in the presence of significant anatomical variations between the atlas-image and the patient's image to be segmented. We also present a quantitative evaluation of lymph node regions segmentation using various statistical as well as geometrical metrics: sensitivity, specificity, dice similarity coefficient and Hausdorff distance. A comparison of the proposed method with two other state of the art methods is presented. The robustness of the proposed method to the atlas selection, in segmenting the lymph node regions, is also evaluated.