Live-wire 3D medical images segmentation
This work addresses the need for efficient and accurate segmentation in medical imaging, though it is incremental as it builds on an existing method with specific improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D medical image segmentation by extending the Live-Wire method to three dimensions and proposing enhancements like path heating and a new graph edge feature function, resulting in up to a 33% reduction in user interaction and improved delineation against strong edges.
This report describes the design, implementation, evaluation and original enhancements to the Live-Wire method for 2D and 3D image segmentation. Live-Wire 2D employs a semi-automatic paradigm; the user is asked to select a few boundary points of the object to segment, to steer the process in the right direction, while the result is displayed in real time. In our implementation segmentation is extended to three dimensions by performing this process on a slice-by-slice basis. User's time and involvement is further reduced by allowing him to specify object contours in planes orthogonal to the slices. If these planes are chosen strategically, Live-Wire 3D can perform 2D segmentation in the plane of each slice automatically. This report also proposes two improvements to the original method, path heating and a new graph edge feature function based on variance of path properties along the boundary. We show that these improvements lead up to a 33% reduction in interaction with the user, and improved delineation in presence of strong interfering edges.