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Kidney segmentation from DCE-MRI converging level set methods, fuzzy clustering and Markov random field modeling

Research Authors
Moumen El-Melegy, Rasha Kamel, Mohamed Abou El-Ghar, Mohamed Shehata, Fahmi Khalifa, Ayman El-Baz
Research Date
Research Department
Research Journal
Scientific Reports
Research Year
2022
Research Abstract

Early diagnosis of transplanted kidney function requires precise Kidney segmentation from Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging images as a preliminary step. In this regard, this paper aims to propose an automated and accurate DCE-MRI kidney segmentation method integrating fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and Markov random field modeling into a level set formulation. The fuzzy memberships, kidney’s shape prior model, and spatial interactions modeled using a second-order MRF guide the LS contour evolution towards the target kidney. Several experiments on real medical data of 45 subjects have shown that the proposed method can achieve high and consistent segmentation accuracy regardless of where the LS contour was initialized. It achieves an accuracy of 0.956 ± 0.019 in Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 1.15 ± 1.46 in 95% percentile of Hausdorff distance (HD95). Our …