Renal compartment segmentation in DCE-MRI images.

Renal compartment segmentation from Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) images is an important task for functional kidney evaluation. Despite advancement in segmentation methods, most of them focus on segmenting an entire kidney on CT images, there still lacks effective and automatic solutions for accurate segmentation of internal renal structures (i.e. cortex, medulla and renal pelvis) from DCE-MRI images. In this paper, we introduce a method for renal compartment segmentation which can robustly achieve high segmentation accuracy for a wide range of DCE-MRI data, and meanwhile requires little manual operations and parameter settings. The proposed method consists of five main steps. First, we pre-process the image time series to reduce the motion artifacts caused by the movement of the patients during the scans and enhance the kidney regions. Second, the kidney is segmented as a whole based on the concept of Maximally Stable Temporal Volume (MSTV). The proposed MSTV detects anatomical structures that are homogeneous in the spatial domain and stable in terms of temporal dynamics. MSTV-based kidney segmentation is robust to noises and does not require a training phase. It can well adapt to kidney shape variations caused by renal dysfunction. Third, voxels in the segmented kidney are described by principal components (PCs) to remove temporal redundancy and noises. And then k-means clustering of PCs is applied to separate voxels into multiple clusters. Fourth, the clusters are automatically labeled as cortex, medulla and pelvis based on voxels' geometric locations and intensity distribution. Finally, an iterative refinement method is introduced to further remove noises in each segmented compartment. Experiments on 14 real clinical kidney datasets and 12 synthetic dataset demonstrate that results produced by our method match very well with those segmented manually and the performance of our method is superior to the other five existing methods.