Evaluation of multi atlas-based approaches for the segmentation of the thyroid gland in IMRT head-and-neck CT images
Antong Chen, Kenneth J. Niermann, Matthew A. Deeley, Benoît M. Dawant · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2011
Segmenting the thyroid gland in head and neck CT images for IMRT treatment planning is of great importance. In this work, we evaluate and compare multi-atlas methods to segment this structure. The various methods we evaluate range from using a single average atlas representative of the population to selecting one atlas based on three similarity measures. We also compare ways to combine segmentation results obtained with several atlases, i.e., vote rule, and STAPLE, which is a commonly used method to combine multiple segmentations. We show that the best results are obtained when several atlases are combined. We also show that with our data sets, STAPLE does not lead to the best results.