Automatic bone segmentation in whole-body CT images

PurposeMany diagnostic or treatment planning applications critically depend on the successful localization of bony structures in CT images. Manual or semiautomatic bone segmentation is tedious, however, and often not practical in clinical routine. In this paper, we present a reliable and fully autom...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Klein, André (Author) , Warszawski, Jan (Author)
Other Authors: Hillengaß, Jens (Other) , Maier-Hein, Klaus H. (Other)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 2019
In: International journal of computer assisted radiology and surgery
Year: 2019, Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Pages: 21-29
ISSN:1861-6429
DOI:10.1007/s11548-018-1883-7
Online Access:Verlag, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-018-1883-7
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Author Notes:André Klein, Jan Warszawski, Jens Hillengaß, Klaus H. Maier-Hein
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Summary:PurposeMany diagnostic or treatment planning applications critically depend on the successful localization of bony structures in CT images. Manual or semiautomatic bone segmentation is tedious, however, and often not practical in clinical routine. In this paper, we present a reliable and fully automatic bone segmentation in whole-body CT scans of patients suffering from multiple myeloma.MethodsWe address this problem by using convolutional neural networks with an architecture inspired by the U-Net [17]. In this publication, we compared three training procedures: (1) training from 2D axial slices, (2) a pseudo-3D approach including axial, sagittal and coronal slices and (3) an approach where the network is pre-trained in an unsupervised manner.ResultsWe evaluated the method on an in-house dataset of 18 whole-body CT scans consisting of 6800 axial slices, achieving a dice score of 0.95 and an intersection over union (IOU) of 0.91. Furthermore, we evaluated our method on the dataset used by Peréz-Carrasco et al. (Comput Methods Progr Biomed 156:85-95, 2018). The data and the ground truth have been made publicly available. The proposed method outperformed the other methods, obtaining a dice score of 0.92 and an IOU of 0.85.ConclusionThese promising results could facilitate the evaluation of bone density and the localization of focal lesions in the future, with a potential impact on both disease staging and treatment planning.
Item Description:Published online: 13 November 2018
Gesehen am 05.06.2019
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:1861-6429
DOI:10.1007/s11548-018-1883-7