Sparse patch based prostate segmentation in CT images

Automatic prostate segmentation plays an important role in image guided radiation therapy. However, accurate prostate segmentation in CT images remains as a challenging problem mainly due to three issues: Low image contrast, large prostate motions, and image appearance variations caused by bowel gas. In this paper, a new patient-specific prostate segmentation method is proposed to address these three issues. The main contributions of our method lie in the following aspects: (1) A new patch based representation is designed in the discriminative feature space to effectively distinguish voxels belonging to the prostate and non-prostate regions. (2) The new patch based representation is integrated with a new sparse label propagation framework to segment the prostate, where candidate voxels with low patch similarity can be effectively removed based on sparse representation. (3) An online update mechanism is adopted to capture more patient-specific information from treatment images scanned in previous treatment days. The proposed method has been extensively evaluated on a prostate CT image dataset consisting of 24 patients with 330 images in total. It is also compared with several state-of-the-art prostate segmentation approaches, and experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve higher segmentation accuracy than other methods under comparison.