Abstract
Automatic and reliable segmentation of hippocampus from MR brain images is of great importance in studies of neurological diseases, such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. In this paper, we proposed a novel metric learning method to fuse segmentation labels in multi-atlas based image segmentation. Different from current label fusion methods that typically adopt a predefined distance metric model to compute a similarity measure between image patches of atlas images and the image to be segmented, we learn a distance metric model from the atlases to keep image patches of the same structure close to each other while those of different structures are separated. The learned distance metric model is then used to compute the similarity measure between image patches in the label fusion. The proposed method has been validated for segmenting hippocampus based on the EADC-ADNI dataset with manually labelled hippocampus of 100 subjects. The experiment results demonstrated that our method achieved statistically significant improvement in segmentation accuracy, compared with state-of-the-art multi-atlas image segmentation methods.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by National Key Basic Research and Development Program (No. 2015CB856404), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81271514, 61473296, 61602307), and NIH grants EB022573, CA189523, and AG014971.
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Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a Group/Institutional Author.
Data used in preparation of this article were obtained from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database (adni.loni.ucla.edu). As such, the investigators within the ADNI contributed to the design and implementation of ADNI and/or provided data but did not participate in analysis or writing of this report. A complete listing of ADNI investigators can be found at: http://adni.loni.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/how_to_apply/ADNI_Acknowledgement_List.pdf
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Zhu, H., Cheng, H., Yang, X. et al. Metric Learning for Multi-atlas based Segmentation of Hippocampus. Neuroinform 15, 41–50 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-016-9312-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-016-9312-y