An approach for reducing the error rate in automated lung segmentation

Robust lung segmentation is challenging, especially when tens of thousands of lung CT scans need to be processed, as required by large multi-center studies. The goal of this work was to develop and assess a method for the fusion of segmentation results from two different methods to generate lung segmentations that have a lower failure rate than individual input segmentations. As basis for the fusion approach, lung segmentations generated with a region growing and model-based approach were utilized. The fusion result was generated by comparing input segmentations and selectively combining them using a trained classification system. The method was evaluated on a diverse set of 204 CT scans of normal and diseased lungs. The fusion approach resulted in a Dice coefficient of 0.9855 +/- 0.0106 and showed a statistically significant improvement compared to both input segmentation methods. In addition, the failure rate at different segmentation accuracy levels was assessed. For example, when requiring that lung segmentations must have a Dice coefficient of better than 0.97, the fusion approach had a failure rate of 6.13%. In contrast, the failure rate for region growing and model-based methods was 18.14% and 15.69%, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method improves the quality of the lung segmentations, which is important for subsequent quantitative analysis of lungs. Also, to enable a comparison with other methods, results on the LOLA11 challenge test set are reported. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.