Region-Based Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Lesion Segmentation from MRI Using Clustering- and Classification-Based Methods with Learning.

In clinical diagnosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) lesion, clinicians are often required to delineate boundaries of NPC on a number of tumor-bearing magnetic resonance images, which is a tedious and time-consuming procedure highly depending on expertise and experience of clinicians. Computer-ai...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Journal of Digital Imaging Vol. 26; no. 3; pp. 472 - 483
Autores principales: Huang, Wei, Chan, Kap, Zhou, Jiayin
Formato: diagnostic images research tables/charts Journal Article
Publicado: Springer Nature Jun2013
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:In clinical diagnosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) lesion, clinicians are often required to delineate boundaries of NPC on a number of tumor-bearing magnetic resonance images, which is a tedious and time-consuming procedure highly depending on expertise and experience of clinicians. Computer-aided tumor segmentation methods (either contour-based or region-based) are necessary to alleviate clinicians' workload. For contour-based methods, a minimal user interaction to draw an initial contour inside or outside the tumor lesion for further curve evolution to match the tumor boundary is preferred, but parameters within most of these methods require manual adjustment, which is technically burdensome for clinicians without specific knowledge. Therefore, segmentation methods with a minimal user interaction as well as automatic parameters adjustment are often favored in clinical practice. In this paper, two region-based methods with parameters learning are introduced for NPC segmentation. Two hundred fifty-three MRI slices containing NPC lesion are utilized for evaluating the performance of the two methods, as well as being compared with other similar region-based tumor segmentation methods. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of adopting learning in the two introduced methods. Also, they achieve comparable segmentation performance from a statistical point of view.