Automatic Multi-organ Segmentation Using Learning-Based Segmentation and Level Set Optimization

Timo Kohlberger, Michal Sofka, Jingdan Zhang, Neil Birkbeck, Jens Wetzl, Jens N. Kaftan, Jérôme Declerck, Shaohua Kevin Zhou

Abstract: We present a novel generic segmentation system for the fully automatic multi-organ segmentation from CT medical images. Thereby we combine the advantages of learning-based approaches on point cloud-based shape representation, such a speed, robustness, point correspondences, with those of PDE-optimization-based level set approaches, such as high accuracy and the straightforward prevention of segment overlaps. In a benchmark on 10–100 annotated datasets for the liver, the lungs, and the kidneys we show that the proposed system yields segmentation accuracies of 1.17–2.89mm average surface errors. Thereby the level set segmentation (which is initialized by the learning-based segmentations) contributes with an 20%-40% increase in accuracy.