MRI Hip Joint Segmentation: A Locally Bhattacharyya Weighted Hybrid 3D Level Set Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid level set approach that locally balances the combined use of both Gradient Vector Flow and region based energy cost function by means of the Bhattacharyya coefficient. The local neighborhood of each contour point is naturally divided into an area encapsulated and one excluded by the contour. We propose utilizing the Bhattacharyya coefficient of the intensity distributions of these local areas to determine a point-wise weighting scheme for the curve propagation. The performance of our method regarding segmentation quality is evaluated on the segmentation of the hip joint in 10 MRI data sets. Our proposed method shows a clear improvement compared to conventional 3D level set approaches.