Automatic segmentation of clinical structures for RTP: Evaluation of a morphological approach

Abstract

This paper describes a morphological segmentation technique developed to assist clinicians and\nradiologists in conformal RTP. The system uses a watershed transformation to give an initial over-segmentation\nof a 2D CT; this is then refined by homotopy modification with markers identified automatically from the image\nhistogram and the final segmentation is represented by a region adjacency graph which may be interactively\nedited by the user. To evaluate the system, 77 CT images from 11 patients have been segmented and the\nresults compared against those produced by 5 clinical experts. The approach has enabled the quality of the\nautomatic segmentation to be assessed in terms of the overall expert intra/inter variability. It has been proved\ngood agreement between computer generated and expert manual delineations.\n