Segmentation of Clinical Structures from Images of the Human Pelvic Area

  • Authors:
  • Juliana Fernandes Camapum;Alzenir O. Silva;Alan N. Freitas;Hansenclever de F. Bassani;Flavia Mendes O. Freitas

  • Affiliations:
  • Universidade de Brasília, Brasil;Universidade de Brasília, Brasil;Universidade de Brasília, Brasil;Universidade de Brasília, Brasil;Universidade de Brasília, Brasil

  • Venue:
  • SIBGRAPI '04 Proceedings of the Computer Graphics and Image Processing, XVII Brazilian Symposium
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

The radiotherapy treatment planning requires the delineation of the therapy structures that will be submitted to the radiation beams. When executed manually, this delineation is a slow process and can result in human errors due to the amount of X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) images that are analyzed in each radiotherapy planning. This process needs precision, minimizing the radiation on healthy areas, close to the target tissues. A new system for automatic segmentation of images of clinical structures is proposed in this work. The algorithm is based on multi-region growing followed by watershed transform. The main contributions are the method of seed pixels selection and predicate of the multi-region growing algorithm and the segmentation results achieved. The system was tested in 400 images and its efficiency was measured by two different statistical methods, correlation and the t-test. The clinical structures of interest are the rectum, bladder and seminal vesicles.