Dynamic multiatlas selection‐based consensus segmentation of head and neck structures from CT images

Purpose Manual delineation of head and neck (H&N) organ‐at‐risk (OAR) structures for radiation therapy planning is time consuming and highly variable. Therefore, we developed a dynamic multiatlas selection‐based approach for fast and reproducible segmentation. Methods Our approach dynamically selects and weights the appropriate number of atlases for weighted label fusion and generates segmentations and consensus maps indicating voxel‐wise agreement between different atlases. Atlases were selected for a target as those exceeding an alignment weight called dynamic atlas attention index. Alignment weights were computed at the image level and called global weighted voting (GWV) or at the structure level and called structure weighted voting (SWV) by using a normalized metric computed as the sum of squared distances of computed tomography (CT)‐radiodensity and modality‐independent neighborhood descriptors (extracting edge information). Performance comparisons were performed using 77 H&N CT images from an internal Memorial Sloan‐Kettering Cancer Center dataset (N = 45) and an external dataset (N = 32) using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff distance (HD), 95th percentile of HD, median of maximum surface distance, and volume ratio error against expert delineation. Pairwise DSC accuracy comparisons of proposed (GWV, SWV) vs single best atlas (BA) or majority voting (MV) methods were performed using Wilcoxon rank‐sum tests. Results Both SWV and GWV methods produced significantly better segmentation accuracy than BA ( P  < 0.001) and MV ( P  < 0.001) for all OARs within both datasets. SWV generated the most accurate segmentations with DSC of: 0.88 for oral cavity, 0.85 for mandible, 0.84 for cord, 0.76 for brainstem and parotids, 0.71 for larynx, and 0.60 for submandibular glands. SWV’s accuracy exceeded GWV's for submandibular glands (DSC = 0.60 vs 0.52, P  = 0.019). Conclusions The contributed SWV and GWV methods generated more accurate automated segmentations than the other two multiatlas‐based segmentation techniques. The consensus maps could be combined with segmentations to visualize voxel‐wise consensus between atlases within OARs during manual review.