Concatenated spatially-localized random forests for hippocampus labeling in adult and infant MR brain images

Lichi Zhang, Qian Wang, Yaozong Gao, Hongxin Li, Guorong Wu, Dinggang Shen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

22 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Automatic labeling of the hippocampus in brain MR images is highly demanded, as it has played an important role in imaging-based brain studies. However, accurate labeling of the hippocampus is still challenging, partially due to the ambiguous intensity boundary between the hippocampus and surrounding anatomies. In this paper, we propose a concatenated set of spatially-localized random forests for multi-atlas-based hippocampus labeling of adult/infant brain MR images. The contribution in our work is two-fold. First, each forest classifier is trained to label just a specific sub-region of the hippocampus, thus enhancing the labeling accuracy. Second, a novel forest selection strategy is proposed, such that each voxel in the test image can automatically select a set of optimal forests, and then dynamically fuses their respective outputs for determining the final label. Furthermore, we enhance the spatially-localized random forests with the aid of the auto-context strategy. In this way, our proposed learning framework can gradually refine the tentative labeling result for better performance. Experiments show that, regarding the large datasets of both adult and infant brain MR images, our method owns satisfactory scalability by segmenting the hippocampus accurately and efficiently.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3-12
Number of pages10
JournalNeurocomputing
Volume229
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017 Mar 15

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • Atlas selection
  • Brain MR images
  • Clustering
  • Image segmentation
  • Random forest

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Artificial Intelligence

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Concatenated spatially-localized random forests for hippocampus labeling in adult and infant MR brain images'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this