Logo image
An approach for reducing the error rate in automated lung segmentation
Journal article   Peer reviewed

An approach for reducing the error rate in automated lung segmentation

Gurman Gill and Reinhard R Beichel
Computers in biology and medicine, Vol.76, pp.143-153
09/01/2016
DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2016.06.022
PMCID: PMC5007179
PMID: 27447897
url
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/5007179View
Open Access

Abstract

Robust lung segmentation is challenging, especially when tens of thousands of lung CT scans need to be processed, as required by large multi-center studies. The goal of this work was to develop and assess a method for the fusion of segmentation results from two different methods to generate lung segmentations that have a lower failure rate than individual input segmentations. As basis for the fusion approach, lung segmentations generated with a region growing and model-based approach were utilized. The fusion result was generated by comparing input segmentations and selectively combining them using a trained classification system. The method was evaluated on a diverse set of 204 CT scans of normal and diseased lungs. The fusion approach resulted in a Dice coefficient of 0.9855±0.0106 and showed a statistically significant improvement compared to both input segmentation methods. In addition, the failure rate at different segmentation accuracy levels was assessed. For example, when requiring that lung segmentations must have a Dice coefficient of better than 0.97, the fusion approach had a failure rate of 6.13%. In contrast, the failure rate for region growing and model-based methods was 18.14% and 15.69%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method improves the quality of the lung segmentations, which is important for subsequent quantitative analysis of lungs. Also, to enable a comparison with other methods, results on the LOLA11 challenge test set are reported.
Classification Computed tomography Lung segmentation Segmentation fusion

Details

Metrics

Logo image