Pharynx Segmentation from MRI Data for Analysis of Sleep Related Disoders

In our project, soft tissue structures of a throat are examined via MRI and anatomic risk factors for sleep related disorders are studied. Segmentation of pharyngeal structures is the first step in three dimensional analysis of throat tissues. We present a pipeline for pharynx segmentation with semi-automatic initialization. The automatic part of the approach consists of three steps: smoothing, thresholding, and 2D and 3D connected component analysis. Whereas two first steps are rather common, the third step provides a set of general rules for extraction of the pharyngeal component. Our method is minimally interactive and requires less than one minute to extract the pharyngeal structures, including the operator interaction part. The approach is evaluated qualitatively using 6 data sets by measuring volume fractions and the Dice's coefficient.

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