A MIL-based interactive approach for hotspot segmentation from bone scintigraphy

Bone scintigraphy is widely used to diagnose bone diseases. Accurate hotspot segmentation is a critical task for tumor metastasis diagnosis. In this paper, we propose an interactive approach to detect and extract hotspots in thoracic region based on a new multiple instance learning (MIL) method called EM-MILBoost. We convert the segmentation problem to a multiple instance learning task by constructing positive and negative bags according to the input bounding box. In order to be robust against noisy input, we train a region-level hotspot classifier with EM-MILBoost and develop several segmentation strategies based on it. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods and is robust against various noisy input.