Optimization-based interactive segmentation interface for multi-region problems

Interactive segmentation is becoming of increasing interest in medical imaging, combining the positive aspects of manual and automated segmentation. However, general purpose tools have been lacking in terms of segmenting multiple regions with a high degree of coupling simultaneously. Hierarchical max-flow segmentation has taken advantage of this coupling for individual applications, but until recently these algorithms were constrained to a particular hierarchy and could not be considered general-purpose. With generalized hierarchical max-flow solvers, the hierarchy is specified in run-time, allowing different hierarchies to be explored. This paper presents a novel interactive segmentation interface, using generalized hierarchical max-flow for multi-region segmentation.