Segmentation of clinical structures from images of the human pelvic area
J.F. Camapum, A.O. Silva, Amanda Nunes de Freitas, Hansenclever F. Bassani, F.M.O. Freitas · 2004
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 the watershed transform. The main contributions are the method of seed pixel 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.