Abstract
Background Anatomical atlases are 3D volumes or shapes representing an organ or structure of the human body. They contain either the prototypical shape of the object of interest together with other shapes representing its statistical variations (statistical atlas) or a probability map of belonging to the object (probabilistic atlas). Probabilistic atlases are mostly built with simple estimations only involving the data at each spatial location.ResultsA new method for probabilistic atlas construction that uses a generalized linear model is proposed. This method aims to improve the estimation of the probability to be covered by the liver. Furthermore, all methods to build an atlas involve previous coregistration of the sample of shapes available. The influence of the geometrical transformation adopted for registration in the quality of the final atlas has not been sufficiently investigated. The ability of an atlas to adapt to a new case is one of the most important quality criteria that should be taken into account. The presented experiments show that some methods for atlas construction are severely affected by the previous coregistration step.ConclusionWe show the good performance of the new approach. Furthermore, results suggest that extremely flexible registration methods are not always beneficial, since they can reduce the variability of the atlas and hence its ability to give sensible values of probability when used as an aid in segmentation of new cases.
Highlights
Anatomical atlases are 3D volumes or shapes representing an organ or structure of the human body
In “Probabilistic atlas: mathematical formulation” section, we propose a new method for probabilistic atlas construction that integrates in a coherent way the two most used techniques: those based on the coverage function and those based on the distance function
Conclusions and further work The experimental study in this work was aimed to highlight the differences between atlas construction methods and its associated coregistration methods when used for anatomical purposes
Summary
Anatomical atlases are 3D volumes or shapes representing an organ or structure of the human body. Lesion detection and surgery planning are very demanding tasks that require extracting the volume of an organ first. For this purpose, image analysis algorithms such as registration or segmentation have to be applied. Without prior knowledge of the organ, in terms of spatial and shape information as well as variability, is difficult to provide a reliable volume. To overcome this limitation most of the current state-of-the-art image analysis techniques use anatomical atlases as a form of priori information like [1,2,3].
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