PET/CT Co-Segmentation Based on Hybrid Active Contour Model

Abstract

This paper proposes a hybrid active contour model for tumor co-segmentation from PET/CT images. We incorporate the foreground of the CT image and the background of the PET image into a co-segmentation framework to establish a new energy functional. Different from existing methods, the proposed model incorporates an edge stopping function based on PET images. The proposed method has been evaluated on a data set of 50 pairs of PET/CT images of non-small cell lung cancer patients and compared with other single-mode segmentation methods and co-segmentation methods. Experimental results show that our model is more robust than other strategies in complex backgrounds.