Tumor volume measurement and volume measurement comparison plug-ins for VolView using ITK

Abstract

Volume measurement plays an important role in many medical applications in which physicians need to quantify tumor growth over time. For example, tumor volume estimation can help physicians diagnose patients and evaluate the effects of therapy. These measurements can also help researchers compare segmentation methods. For researchers to quickly check the results of volume data processing, they need a graphical interface with volume visualization features. VolView is an interactive visualization environment which provides such an interface. The plug-in architecture of VolView allows it to be used as a visualization platform for evaluation of advanced image processing algorithms. In this work, we implemented VolView plug-ins for two volume measurement algorithms and three volume comparison algorithms. One volume measurement algorithm involves voxel counting and the other provides finer volume measurement by anti-aliasing the tumor volume. The three volume comparison methods are a maximum surface distance measure, mean absolute surface distance, and a volumetric overlap measure. In this implementation, we rely heavily on software components from the open source Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). The paper also presents the use of the VolView environment to evaluate liver tumor segmentation based on level set techniques. The simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE) method was used to evaluate the estimated ground truth from multiple radiologists.