Optimization-based interactive segmentation interface for multiregion problems
Published in Journal of Medical Imaging, 2016
Recommended citation: Baxter JS, Rajchl M, Peters TM, Chen ECS, (2016). "Optimization-based interactive segmentation interface for multiregion problems"; in Journal of Medical Imaging, 3(2), pp. 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.3.2.024003
Interactive segmentation is becoming of increasing interest to the medical imaging community in that it combines the positive aspects of both manual and automated segmentation. However, general-purpose tools have been lacking in terms of segmenting multiple regions simultaneously with a high degree of coupling between groups of labels. Hierarchical max-flow segmentation has taken advantage of this coupling for individual applications, but until recently, these algorithms were constrained to a particular hierarchy and could not be considered general-purpose. In a generalized form, the hierarchy for any given segmentation problem is specified in run-time, allowing different hierarchies to be quickly explored. We present an interactive segmentation interface, which uses generalized hierarchical max-flow for optimization-based multiregion segmentation guided by user-defined seeds. Applications in cardiac and neonatal brain segmentation are given as example applications of its generality.