Automatic anatomy recognition on CT images with pathology

Abstract

Body-wide anatomy recognition on CT images with pathology becomes crucial for quantifying body-wide disease burden. This, however, is a challenging problem because various diseases result in various abnormalities of objects such as shape and intensity patterns. We previously developed an automatic anatomy recognition (AAR) system [1] whose applicability was demonstrated on near normal diagnostic CT images in different body regions on 35 organs. The aim of this paper is to investigate strategies for adapting the previous AAR system to diagnostic CT images of patients with various pathologies as a first step toward automated body-wide disease quantification. The AAR approach consists of three main steps – model building, object recognition, and object delineation. In this paper, within the broader AAR framework, we describe a new strategy for object recognition to handle abnormal images. In the model building stage an optimal threshold interval is learned from near-normal training images for each object. This threshold is optimally tuned to the pathological manifestation of the object in the test image. Recognition is performed following a hierarchical representation of the objects. Experimental results for the abdominal body region based on 50 near-normal images used for model building and 20 abnormal images used for object recognition show that object localization accuracy within 2 voxels for liver and spleen and 3 voxels for kidney can be achieved with the new strategy.