Segmentation of multiple muscles in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is challenging because of the similar intensities of the tissue. In this paper, a novel approach is presented applying a scene-based discrete deformable model (simplex mesh). 3D segmentation is performed on a set of structures rather than on a single object. Relevant structures are modeled in a two-stage hierarchy from groups of clustered muscles (as they usually appear in MRI) to individual muscles. Collision detection is involved during mesh deformation to provide additional information of neighboring structures. The method is implemented in C++ within the Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit (MITK) framework. As a proof of concept, we tested the approach on five datasets of the pelvis, three of which have been segmented manually. Indicating the potential impact of the method, we do not claim its general validity yet.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA)
provide efficient and flexible means for medical diagnostics and research. Within
the scope of the regional anaesthesia simulator (RASim) project1), a virtual
reality-based simulation for performing local anesthetics on individual virtual
patients is developed [
So far, fuzzy c-means clustering was used to segment bone and muscles as
well as vessels from MRI and MRA, respectively [
Yushkevich et al. proposed two well-known three-dimensional (3D) active
contour segmentation methods: Geodesic Active Contour and Region
Competition in the software application ITK-SNAP [
Jurcak et al. proposed an atlas-based segmentation for the quadratus
lumborum muscle [
Model-based segmentation with deformable simplex meshes have been
introduced to MRI by Delingette [
In this paper, we extend this approach to scene-based segmentation of individual muscles in MRI and model a two-stage scene hierarchy to improve both, speed and quality. 2 2.1
A k-simplex mesh is considered as a (k + 1)-connected mesh: each vertex has exactly (k + 1) distinct neighboring vertices. This simple geometry feature yields efficient calculation of the deformation. In this paper, we use 2-simplex meshes for the deformable model, which can be generated directly from manually labeled image as reference data. The internal force is controlled by tangential and normal components based on the geometry of the simplex mesh to keep the shape smoothing during the deformation. The calculation of the external force is also based on the gradient of the input image. The vertices are driven by the external force and move to the voxels of maximum gradient intensity on their normal lines.
Therefore, the problem caused by similar intensities both on the input MRI data and its gradients still affects the result of deformation like other deformable models, namely, the gradients can’t provide enough edge information for a single deformable model. Hence, a scene-based collision detection is applied introducing additional forces when segments are about to get in contact during the iteration. Considering two neighboring simplex meshes in 3D space that are not separated by a clearly defined edge, they will balance each other on a reasonable location.
In other words, low contrast in parts of MRI is compensated by internal and scene-based 3D a-priori information. 2.2
The collision detection is achieved from bounding volume hierarchies (BHV)
[
During the segmentation, deformation begins with the simplex meshes of the groups until convergence is reached. Then, the displacements of the individual muscles inside the groups are determined. The final positions provide accurate edge information for all structures, and the number of iterations is reduced. Also, the steps of collision detection are reduced yielding remarkable performance gain. For instance, modeling two muscle groups with more than 30,000 vertices an iteration incl. collision detection takes less than 5 s.
Implementation in C++ relies on the Insight Toolkit (ITK), the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and the Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit (MITK) frameworks. At first, the ITK standard 3D registration of target to reference dataset is performed. Scene-based segmentation is initialized with a mean model computed by co-registration of all three references. Using mutual information, the transform matrix is computed on MRI but then applied to the labeled data. 3
The algorithm is tested on datasets of the pelvis region. Reference data is composed of co-registered MRI and MRA examinations from five subjects, selected to span a large variance in body mass, height, age, and gender. Three datasets have been segmented manually by experienced anatomists. They are used as reference models. In total, 25 muscles have been labeled (Fig. 3, Fig. 4). A complete automatic segmentation with two muscle groups (subdivided into 12 individual muscles) and bone takes about 15 min. Combining deformable simplex mesh and collision detection in 3D provides an efficient method for scene-based segmentation for multiple muscles from MRI. The presented approach contributes a scene-based mesh segmentation that is capable to extract/match individual muscles, which have fairly poor contrast in the source data. The proof-of-concept scene is composed of about 25 objects, which are divided into sub-scenes of at most eight objects using a two-stage hierarchy. This has remarkable performance gain in both, computation time and quality. Collision detection gives the deformable models additionally the missing edge information where no clearly defined boundary is available.
The first visual results are promising and more experiments are planned to assess the precision quantitatively. Using only two references to initialize the algorithm, error measures become computable in a leaving-one-out design. Highest precision is not the goal of this approach. However, plausible approximated results are sufficient for most training simulators. Furthermore, adaption to other body regions with even more complex structures is planned.
This work was developed under the auspices of the German Research Foundation (DFG, RO 2000/7-1, KU 1132/4-1, LE 1108/8-1).