Atlas-Based Under-Segmentation

We study the widespread, but rarely discussed, tendency of atlas-based segmentation to under-segment the organs of interest. Commonly used error measures do not distinguish between under- and over-segmentation, contributing to the problem. We explicitly quantify over- and under-segmentation in several typical examples and present a new hypothesis for the cause. We provide evidence that segmenting only one organ of interest and merging all surrounding structures into one label creates bias towards background in the label estimates suggested by the atlas. We propose a generative model that corrects for this effect by learning the background structures from the data. Inference in the model separates the background into distinct structures and consequently improves the segmentation accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate a clear improvement in several applications.