Unsupervised cluster‐based method for segmenting biological tumour volume of laryngeal tumours in 18 F‐FDG‐PET images

Abstract

In radiotherapy using 18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG-PET), the accurate delineation of the biological tumour volume (BTV) is a crucial step. In this study, the authors suggest a new approach to segment the BTV in 18F-FDG-PET images. The technique is based on the k-means clustering algorithm incorporating automatic optimal cluster number estimation, using intrinsic positron emission tomography image information. Clinical dataset of seven patients have a laryngeal tumour with the actual BTV defined by histology serves as a reference, were included in this study for the evaluation of results. Promising results obtained by the proposed approach with a mean error equal to (0.7%) compared with other existing methods in clinical routine, including fuzzy c-means with (35.58%), gradient-based method with (19.14%) and threshold-based methods.