Pull-push level sets: a new term to encode prior knowledge for the segmentation of teeth images

Rodrigo de Luis Garcia, R. San Jose Estepar, Carlos Alberola-Lopez
Medical Imaging 2005: Image Processing
Volume 5747, Pages 598-605
April, 2005

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel level set method for contour detection in multiple-object scenarios applied to the segmentation of teeth images. Teeth segmentation from 2D images of dental plaster cast models is a difficult problem because it is necessary to independently segment several objects that have very badly defined borders between them. Current methods for contour detection which only employ image information cannot successfully segment such structures. Being therefore necessary to use prior knowledge about the problem domain, current approaches in the literature are limited to the extraction of shape information of individual objects, whereas the key factor in such a problem are the relative positions of the different objects composing the anatomical structure. Therefore, we propose a novel method for introducing such information into a level set framework. This results in a new energy term which can be explained as a regional term that takes into account the relative positions of the different objects, and consequently creates an attraction or repulsion force that favors a determined configuration. The proposed method is compared with balloon and GVF snakes, as well as with the Geodesic Active Regions model, showing accurate results.

Segmentation results using pull-push level sets.

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Reference

de Luis Garcia R, San Jose Estepar R, Alberola-Lopez C. Pull-push level sets: a new term to encode prior knowledge for the segmentation of teeth images. In Medical Imaging 2005: Image Processing, volume 5747 of Proceedings of SPIE. 2005;598-605.

Bibtex entry

@InProceedings{deluisSPIE05,
  author         = {Rodrigo {de Luis Garcia} and Raul {San Jose Estepar} and   
                   Carlos Alberola-Lopez},                                     
  title          = {Pull-push level sets: a new term to encode prior knowledge 
                   for the segmentation of teeth images},                      
  booktitle      = {Medical Imaging 2005: Image Processing},                   
  series         = {Proceedings of SPIE},                                      
  pages          = {598--605},                                                 
  year           = {2005},                                                     
  volume         = {5747},                                                     
  editors        = {J. Michael Fitzpatrick, Joseph M. Reinhardt},              
  month          = {April}
}