Auxiliary anatomical labels for joint segmentation and atlas registration

This paper studies improving joint segmentation and registration by introducing auxiliary labels for anatomy that has similar appearance to the target anatomy while not being part of that target. Such auxiliary labels help avoid false positive labelling of non-target anatomy by resolving ambiguity. A known registration of a segmented atlas can help identify where a target segmentation should lie. Conversely, segmentations of anatomy in two images can help them be better registered. Joint segmentation and registration is then a method that can leverage information from both registration and segmentation to help one another. It has received increasing attention recently in the literature. Often, merely a single organ of interest is labelled in the atlas. In the presense of other anatomical structures with similar appearance, this leads to ambiguity in intensity based segmentation; for example, when segmenting individual bones in CT images where other bones share the same intensity profile. To alleviate this problem, we introduce automatic generation of additional labels in atlas segmentations, by marking similar-appearance non-target anatomy with an auxiliary label. Information from the auxiliary-labeled atlas segmentation is then incorporated by using a novel coherence potential, which penalizes differences between the deformed atlas segmentation and the target segmentation estimate. We validated this on a joint segmentation-registration approach that iteratively alternates between registering an atlas and segmenting the target image to find a final anatomical segmentation. The results show that automatic auxiliary labelling outperforms the same approach using a single label atlasses, for both mandibular bone segmentation in 3D-CT and corpus callosum segmentation in 2D-MRI.