Evaluating Segmentation of MR Volumes Using Predictive Models and Machine Learning

Abstract: A reliable evaluation system is essential for every automatic process. While techniques for automatic segmentation of images have been extensively researched in recent years, evaluation of the same has not received an equal amount of attention. Amra Medical AB has developed a system for automatic segmentation of magnetic resonance (MR) images of human bodies using an atlas-based approach. Through their software, Amra is able to derive body composition measurements, such as muscle and fat volumes, from the segmented MR images. As of now, the automatic segmentations are quality controlled by clinical experts to ensure their correctness. This thesis investigates the possibilities to leverage predictive modelling to reduce the need for a manual quality control (QC) step in an otherwise automatic process. Two different regression approaches have been implemented as a part of this study: body composition measurement prediction (BCMP) and manual correction prediction (MCP). BCMP aims at predicting the derived body composition measurements and comparing the predictions to actual measurements. The theory is that large deviations between the predictions and the measurements signify an erroneously segmented sample. MCP instead tries to directly predict the amount of manual correction needed for each sample. Several regression models have been implemented and evaluated for the two approaches. Comparison of the regression models shows that local linear regression (LLR) is the most performant model for both BCMP and MCP. The results show that the inaccuracies in the BCMP-models, in practice, renders this approach useless. MCP proved to be a far more viable approach; using MCP together with LLR achieves a high true positive rate with a reasonably low false positive rate for several body composition measurements. These results suggest that the type of system developed in this thesis has the potential to reduce the need for manual inspections of the automatic segmentation masks.