Local manifold learning for multiatlas segmentation: application to hippocampal segmentation in healthy population and Alzheimer's disease

Aims: Automated hippocampal segmentation is an important issue in many neuroscience studies. Methods: We presented and evaluated a novel segmentation method that utilized a manifold learning technique under the multiatlas-based segmentation scenario. A manifold representation of local patches for each voxel was achieved by applying an Isomap algorithm, which can then be used to obtain spatially local weights of atlases for label fusion. The obtained atlas weights potentially depended on all pairwise similarities of the population, which is in contrast to most existing label fusion methods that only rely on similarities between the target image and the atlases. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated for hippocampal segmentation and compared with two representative local weighted label fusion methods, that is, local majority voting and local weighted inverse distance voting, on an in-house dataset of 28 healthy adolescents (age range: 10-17 years) and two ADNI datasets of 100 participants (age range: 60-89 years). We also implemented hippocampal volumetric analysis and evaluated segmentation performance using atlases from a different dataset. Results: The median Dice similarities obtained by our proposed method were approximately 0.90 for healthy subjects and above 0.88 for two mixed diagnostic groups of ADNI subjects. Conclusion: The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method could obtain consistent and significant improvements over label fusion strategies that are implemented in the original space.