Soft-split random forest for anatomy labeling

Random Forest (RF) has been widely used in the learning-based labeling. In RF, each sample is directed from the root to each leaf based on the decisions made in the interior nodes, also called splitting nodes. The splitting nodes assign a testing sample to either left or right child based on the learned splitting function. The final prediction is determined as the average of label probability distributions stored in all arrived leaf nodes. For ambiguous testing samples, which often lie near the splitting boundaries, the conventional splitting function, also referred to as hard split function, tends to make wrong assignments, hence leading to wrong predictions. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel soft-split random forest (SSRF) framework to improve the reliability of node splitting and finally the accuracy of classification. Specifically, a soft split function is employed to assign a testing sample into both left and right child nodes with their certain probabilities, which can effectively reduce influence of the wrong node assignment on the prediction accuracy. As a result, each testing sample can arrive at multiple leaf nodes, and their respective results can be fused to obtain the final prediction according to the weights accumulated along the path from the root node to each leaf node. Besides, considering the importance of context information, we also adopt a Haar-features based context model to iteratively refine the classification map. We have comprehensively evaluated our method on two public datasets, respectively, for labeling hippo-campus in MR images and also labeling three organs in Head & Neck CT images. Compared with the hard-split RF (HSRF), our method achieved a notable improvement in labeling accuracy.