High-order Feature Learning for Multi-atlas based Label Fusion: Application to Brain Segmentation with MRI

Multi-atlas based segmentation methods have shown their effectiveness in brain regions-of-interesting (ROIs) segmentation, by propagating labels from multiple atlases to a target image based on the similarity between patches in the target image and multiple atlas images. Most of the existing multiatlas based methods use image intensity features to calculate the similarity between a pair of image patches for label fusion. In particular, using only low-level image intensity features cannot adequately characterize the complex appearance patterns (e.g., the high-order relationship between voxels within a patch) of brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. To address this issue, this paper develops a high-order feature learning framework for multi-atlas based label fusion, where high-order features of image patches are extracted and fused for segmenting ROIs of structural brain MR images. Specifically, an unsupervised feature learning method (i.e., means-covariances restricted Boltzmann machine, mcRBM) is employed to learn high-order features (i.e., mean and covariance features) of patches in brain MR images. Then, a group-fused sparsity dictionary learning method is proposed to jointly calculate the voting weights for label fusion, based on the learned high-order and the original image intensity features. The proposed method is compared with several state-of-the-art label fusion methods on ADNI, NIREP and LONI-LPBA40 datasets. The Dice ratio achieved by our method is 88:30%, 88:83%, 79:54% and 81:02% on left and right hippocampus on the ADNI, NIREP and LONI-LPBA40 datasets, respectively, while the best Dice ratio yielded by the other methods are 86:51%, 87:39%, 78:48% and 79:65% on three datasets, respectively.