Title
Partial volume correction for volume estimation of liver metastases and lymph nodes in CT scans using spatial subdivision
Abstract
In oncological therapy monitoring, the estimation of tumor growth from consecutive CT scans is an important aspect in deciding whether the given treatment is adequate for the patient. This can be done by measuring and comparing the volume of a lesion in the scans based on a segmentation. However, simply counting the voxels within the segmentation mask can lead to significant differences in the volume, if the lesion has been segmented slightly differently by various readers or in different scans, due to the limited spatial resolution of CT and due to partial volume effects. We present a novel algorithm for measuring the volume of liver metastases and lymph nodes which considers partial volume effects at the surface of a lesion. Our algorithm is based on a spatial subdivision of the segmentation. We have evaluated the algorithm on a phantom and a multi-reader study. Our evaluations have shown that our algorithm allows determining the volume more accurately even for larger slice thicknesses. Moreover, it reduces inter-observer variability of volume measurements significantly. The calculation of the volume takes 2 seconds for 50(3) voxels on a single 2.66GHz Intel Core2 CPU.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1117/12.844200
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Classification,Statistical methods,Quantification,Volume,Partial volume effect,Partial volume artifacts,Partial volume correction,Measurement
Voxel,Lymph,Nuclear medicine,Computer vision,Lesion,Segmentation,Imaging phantom,Subdivision,Artificial intelligence,Partial volume,Image resolution,Physics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7623
0277-786X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Frank Heckel1414.59
Volker Dicken221819.02
tilman bostel300.34
Michael Fabel4524.01
andreas kiessling500.34
Heinz-otto Peitgen61030114.91