A whole body atlas for segmentation and delineation of organs for radiation therapy planning

A semi-automatic procedure for delineation of organs to be used as the basis of a whole body atlas database for radiation therapy planning was developed. The Visible Human Male Computed Tomography (CT)-data set was used as a 'standard man' reference. The organ of interest was outlined manually and then transformed by a polynomial warping algorithm onto a clinical patient CT. This provided an initial contour, which was then adjusted and refined by the semi-automatic active contour model to find the final organ outline. The liver was used as a test organ for evaluating the performance of the procedure. Liver outlines obtained by the segmentation algorithm on six patients were compared to those manually drawn by a radiologist. The combination of warping and semi-automatic active contour model generally provided satisfactory segmentation results, but the procedure has to be extended to three dimensions