Vertebral body segmentation with GrowCut: Initial experience, workflow and practical application
This work addresses the need for faster and more efficient segmentation in medical imaging for clinicians, though it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The study tackled the problem of segmenting vertebral bodies in medical images by applying the GrowCut algorithm, finding that it consistently reduced segmentation times compared to manual methods.
In this contribution, we used the GrowCut segmentation algorithm publicly available in three-dimensional Slicer for three-dimensional segmentation of vertebral bodies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the GrowCut method has been studied for the usage of vertebral body segmentation. In brief, we found that the GrowCut segmentation times were consistently less than the manual segmentation times. Hence, GrowCut provides an alternative to a manual slice-by-slice segmentation process.