Declustering n-connected components for segmentation of iodine implants in C-arm fluoroscopy images

  • Authors:
  • Chiara Amat Di San Filippo;Gabor Fichtinger;William James Morris;Septimiu E. Salcudean;Ehsan Dehghan;Pascal Fallavollita

  • Affiliations:
  • Technische Universität München, Germany;Queen's University, Kingston, Canada;Vancouver Cancer Center, Vancouver, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada;Philips Healthcare, New York;Technische Universität München, Germany

  • Venue:
  • IPCAI'13 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Information Processing in Computer-Assisted Interventions
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Dynamic dosimetry is becoming the standard to evaluate the quality of radioactive implants during brachytherapy. It is essential to obtain a 3D visualization of the implanted seeds and their relative position to the prostate. For this, a robust and precise segmentation of the seeds in 2D X-ray is required. First, implanted seeds are segmented using a region-based implicit active contour approach. Then, n-seed clusters are resolved using an efficient template based approach. A collection of 55 C-arm images from 10 patients are used to validate the proposed algorithm. Compared to manual ground-truth segmentation of 6002 seeds, 98.7% of seeds were automatically detected and declustered showing a false-positive rate of only 1.7%. Results indicate the proposed method is able to perform the identification and annotation processes of seeds on par with a human expert, constituting a viable alternative to the traditional manual segmentation approach.