MULTI-ATLAS-BASED SEGMENTATION OF PELVIC STRUCTURES FROM CT SCANS FOR PLANNING IN PROSTATE CANCER RADIOTHERAPY

Abstract : In prostate cancer radiotherapy, the accurate identification of the prostate and organs at risk in planning computer tomography (CT) images is an important part of the therapy planning and optimization. Manually contouring these organs can be a time consuming process and subject to intra- and inter-expert variability. Automatic identification of organ boundaries from these images is challenging due to the poor soft tissue contrast. Atlas-based approaches may provide a priori structural information by propagating manual expert delineations to a new individual space; however the inter-individual variability and registration errors may lead to biased results. Multi-atlas approaches can partly overcome some of these difficulties by selecting the most similar atlases among a large data base but the definition of similarity measure between the available atlases and the query individual has still to be addressed. The purpose of this chapter is to explain atlas-based segmentation approaches and the evaluation of different atlas-based strategies to simultaneously segment prostate, bladder and rectum from CT images. A comparison between single and multiple atlases is performed. Experiments on atlas ranking, selection strategies and fusion decision rules are carried out to illustrate the presented methodology. Propagation of labels using two registration strategies are applied and the results of the comparison with manual delineations are reported.