Improving multi-atlas cardiac structure segmentation of computed tomography angiography: A performance evaluation based on a heterogeneous dataset

Multi-atlas based segmentation is an effective technique that transforms a representative set of atlas images and labels into a target image for structural segmentation. However, a significant limitation of this approach relates to the fact that the atlas and the target images need to be similar in volume orientation, coverage, or acquisition protocols in order to prevent image misregistration and avoid segmentation fault. In this study, we aim to evaluate the impact of using a heterogeneous Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) dataset on the performance of a multi-atlas cardiac structure segmentation framework. We propose a generalized technique based upon using the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) supervoxel method to detect a bounding box region enclosing the heart before subsequent cardiac structure segmentation. This technique facilitates our framework to process CTA datasets acquired from distinct imaging protocols and to improve its segmentation accuracy and speed. In a four-way cross comparison based on 60 CTA studies from our institution and 60 CTA datasets from the Multi-Modality Whole Heart Segmentation MICCAI challenge, we show that the proposed framework performs well in segmenting seven different cardiac structures based upon interchangeable atlas and target datasets acquired from different imaging settings. For the overall results, our automated segmentation framework attains a median Dice, mean distance, and Hausdorff distance of 0.88, 1.5 mm, and 9.69 mm over the entire datasets. The average processing time was 1.55 min for both datasets. Furthermore, this study shows that it is feasible to exploit heterogenous datasets from different imaging protocols and institutions for accurate multi-atlas cardiac structure segmentation.