Segmentation of fluoroscopy images is useful for fluoroscopy-to-CT image registration. However, it is impossible to assign a unique tissue type to each pixel. Rather each pixel corresponds to an entire path of tissue types encountered along a ray from the X-ray source to the detector plate. Furthermore, there is an inherent many-to-one mapping between paths and pixel values. We address these issues by assigning to each pixel not a scalar value but a fuzzy vector of tissue probabilities. We perform this segmentation in a probabilistic way by first learning typical distributions of bone, air, and soft tissue that correspond to certain fluoroscopy image values and then assigning each value to a probability distribution over its most likely generating paths. We then evaluate this segmentation on ground truth patient data.

Date Published: 9 May 2002
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 4684, Medical Imaging 2002: Image Processing, (9 May 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.467102

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4684:
Medical Imaging 2002: Image Processing
Milan Sonka; J. Michael Fitzpatrick, Editor(s)