Highly Accurate Facial Nerve Segmentation Refinement From CBCT/CT Imaging Using a Super-Resolution Classification Approach.

Abstract

Facial nerve segmentation is of considerable importance for preoperative planning of cochlear implantation. However, it is strongly influenced by the relatively low resolution of the cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) images used in clinical practice. In this paper, we propose a super-resolution classification method, which refines a given initial segmentation of the facial nerve to a subvoxel classification level from CBCT/CT images. The super-resolution classification method learns the mapping from low-resolution CBCT/CT images to high-resolution facial nerve label images, obtained from manual segmentation on micro-CT images. We present preliminary results on dataset, 15 ex vivo samples scanned including pairs of CBCT/CT scans and high-resolution micro-CT scans, with a leave-one-out evaluation, and manual segmentations on micro-CT images as ground truth. Our experiments achieved a segmentation accuracy with a Dice coefficient of , surface-to-surface distance of , and Hausdorff distance of . We compared the proposed technique to two other semi-automated segmentation software tools, ITK-SNAP and GeoS, and show the ability of the proposed approach to yield subvoxel levels of accuracy in delineating the facial nerve.