A combined region growing and deformable model method for extraction of closed surfaces in 3D CT and MRI scans

Image segmentation of 3D medical images is a challenging problem with several still not totally solved practical issues, such as noise interference, variable object structures and image artifacts. This paper describes a hybrid 3D image segmentation method which combines region growing and deformable models to obtain accurate and topologically preserving surface structures of anatomical objects of interest. The proposed strategy starts by determining a rough but robust approximation of the objects using a region-growing algorithm. Then, the closed surface mesh that encloses the region is constructed and used as the initial geometry of a deformable model for the final refinement. This integrated strategy provides an alternative solution to one of the flaws of traditional deformable models, achieving good refinements of internal surfaces in few steps. Experimental segmentation results of complex anatomical structures on both simulated and real data from MRI scans are presented, and the method is assessed by comparing with standard reference segmentations of head MRI. The evaluation was mainly based on the average overlap measure, which was tested on the segmentation of white matter, corresponding to a simulated brain data set, showing excellent performance exceeding 90% accuracy. In addition, the algorithm was applied to the detection of anatomical head structures on two real MRI and one CT data set. The final reconstructions resulting from the deformable models produce high quality meshes suitable for 3D visualization and further numerical analysis. The obtained results show that the approach achieves high quality segmentations with low computational complexity.