Probabilistic multi-shape segmentation of knee extensor and flexor muscles.

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) often exhibit skeletal muscle weakness in lower limbs. Analysis of the shapes and sizes of these muscles can lead to more effective therapy. Unfortunately, segmenting these muscles from one another is a challenging task due to a lack of image information in many areas. We present a fully automatic segmentation method that overcomes the inherent difficulties of this problem to accurately segment the different muscles. Our method enforces a multi-region shape prior on the segmentation to ensure feasibility and provides an energy minimizing probabilistic segmentation that indicates areas of uncertainty. Our experiments on 3D MRI datasets yield an average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.92 +/- 0.03 with the ground truth.