Consistent Multi-Atlas Hippocampus Segmentation for Longitudinal MR Brain Images with Temporal Sparse Representation

• Published in: Patch-Based Techniques in Medical Imaging Vol. 9993; pp. 34 - 42
• Main Authors: Wang, Lin, Guo, Yanrong, Cao, Xiaohuan, Wu, Guorong, Shen, Dinggang
• Format: Book Chapter Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 01.01.2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Graphics programming; Group Mean Image; Hippocampus Segmentation; Image processing; Label Fusion Method; Pattern recognition; Subject Image; Temporal Consistency Constraints
• ISBN: 9783319471174; 3319471171
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-47118-1_5

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-atlas based longitudinal label fusion method with temporal sparse representation technique to segment hippocampi at all time points simultaneously. First, we use groupwise longitudinal registration to simultaneously (1) estimate a group-mean image of a subject image sequence and (2) register its all time-point images to the estimated group-mean image consistently over time. Then, by registering all atlases with the group-mean image, we can align all atlases longitudinally consistently to each time point of the subject image sequence. Finally, we propose a longitudinal label fusion method to propagate all atlas labels to the subject image sequence by simultaneously labeling a set of temporally-corresponded voxels with a temporal consistency constraint on sparse representation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve more accurate and consistent hippocampus segmentation than the state-of-the-art counterpart methods.