Scale-adaptive supervoxel-based random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans

Abstract

Purpose: Toward an efficient clinical management of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), we propose a classification framework dedicated to tumor necrosis rate estimation from dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans. Based on machine learning, it requires weak interaction efforts to segment healthy, active and necrotic liver tissues.

Methods: Our contributions are two-fold. First, we apply random forest (RF) on supervoxels using multi-phase supervoxel-based features that discriminate tissues based on their dynamic in response to contrast agent injection. Second, we extend this technique in a hierarchical multi-scale fashion to deal with multiple spatial extents and appearance heterogeneity. It translates in an adaptive data sampling scheme combining RF and hierarchical multi-scale tree resulting from recursive supervoxel decomposition. By concatenating multi-phase features across the hierarchical multi-scale tree to describe leaf supervoxels, we enable RF to automatically infer the most informative scales without defining any explicit rules on how to combine them.

Results: Assessment on clinical data confirms the benefits of multi-phase information embedded in a multi-scale supervoxel representation for HCC tumor segmentation.

Conclusion: Dedicated but not limited only to HCC management, both contributions reach further steps toward more accurate multi-label tissue classification.

Keywords: Dynamic features; Hierarchical multi-scale tree; Liver tumor segmentation; Random forest; Spatial adaptivity; Supervoxels.