Multi-Atlas Segmentation of Anatomical Brain Structures Using Hierarchical Hypergraph Learning

Accurate segmentation of anatomical brain structures is crucial for many neuroimaging applications, e.g., early brain development studies and the study of imaging biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases. Although multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) has achieved many successes in the medical imaging area, this approach encounters limitations in segmenting anatomical structures associated with poor image contrast. To address this issue, we propose a new MAS method that uses a hypergraph learning framework to model the complex subject-within and subject-to-atlas image voxel relationships and propagate the label on the atlas image to the target subject image. To alleviate the low-image contrast issue, we propose two strategies equipped with our hypergraph learning framework. First, we use a hierarchical strategy that exploits high-level context features for hypergraph construction. Because the context features are computed on the tentatively estimated probability maps, we can ultimately turn the hypergraph learning into a hierarchical model. Second, instead of only propagating the labels from the atlas images to the target subject image, we use a dynamic label propagation strategy that can gradually use increasing reliably identified labels from the subject image to aid in predicting the labels on the difficult-to-label subject image voxels. Compared with the state-of-the-art label fusion methods, our results show that the hierarchical hypergraph learning framework can substantially improve the robustness and accuracy in the segmentation of anatomical brain structures with low image contrast from magnetic resonance (MR) images.