Dual-modality brain PET-CT image segmentation based on adaptive use of functional and anatomical information

Yong Xia, Stefan Eberl, Lingfeng Wen, Michael Fulham, David Dagan Feng

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

Dual medical imaging modalities, such as PET-CT, are now a routine component of clinical practice. Medical image segmentation methods, however, have generally only been applied to single modality images. In this paper, we propose the dual-modality image segmentation model to segment brain PET-CT images into gray matter, white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. This model converts PET-CT image segmentation into an optimization process controlled simultaneously by PET and CT voxel values and spatial constraints. It is innovative in the creation and application of the modality discriminatory power (MDP) coefficient as a weighting scheme to adaptively combine the functional (PET) and anatomical (CT) information on a voxel-by-voxel basis. Our approach relies upon allowing the modality with higher discriminatory power to play a more important role in the segmentation process. We compared the proposed approach to three other image segmentation strategies, including PET-only based segmentation, combination of the results of independent PET image segmentation and CT image segmentation, and simultaneous segmentation of joint PET and CT images without an adaptive weighting scheme. Our results in 21 clinical studies showed that our approach provides the most accurate and reliable segmentation for brain PET-CT images.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)47-53
Number of pages7
JournalComputerized Medical Imaging and Graphics
Volume36
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2012
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Dual-modality medical imaging
  • Functional PET imaging
  • Image segmentation
  • Medical image analyze

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