Seed relabeling for seed-based segmentation of a medical image

Abstract

A mechanism is provided for seed relabeling for seed-based slice-wise lesion segmentation. The mechanism receives a lesion mask for a three-dimensional medical image volume. The lesion mask corresponds to detected lesions in the medical image volume and wherein each detected lesion has a lesion contour. The mechanism generates a distance map for a given two-dimensional slice in the medical image volume based on the lesion mask. The distance map comprises a distance to a lesion contour for each voxel of the given two-dimensional slice. The mechanism performs local maxima identification to select a set of local maxima from the distance map such that each local maximum has a value greater than its immediate neighbor points. The mechanism performs seed relabeling based on the distance map and the set of local maxima to generate a set of seeds. Each seed represents a center of a distinct component of a lesion contour. The mechanism performs image segmentation on the lesion mask based on the set of seeds to form a split lesion mask.