Suggesting Optimal Delineation Planes for Interactive 3D Segmentation

Abstract

Many tasks in clinical practice and medical image research require a good segmentation of anatomical structures. All too often this has to be done manually, which is a very time-consuming process. Several tools aim at speeding up this process by using reconstruction algorithms to interpolate structures based on manually provided contours. The resulting accuracy of these interpolations as well as the required amount of time depends very much on the placement of the contour information. In this work we present an algorithm, which reduces the time required by automatically suggesting optimal delineation planes. Based on the distance between the reconstructed 3D surface mesh and edges in the original image it determines which next plane will likely result in the maximum improvement for the 3D reconstruction. The proposed approach was evaluated by comparing segmentations that are created with purely manual plane selection, with segmentations that are created using the automatic plane suggestion. We show a significant reduction in the time required to segment a number of structures with only a slight decrease in segmentation accuracy.