Automatic Pharynx Segmentation from MRI Data for Analysis of Sleep Related Disorders

In our project, we analyse throat structures using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to associate anatomic risk factors with sleep related disorders. Pharynx segmentation is the first step in the three-dimensional analysis of throat tissues. We present a pipeline for automatic pharynx segmentation. The automatic part of the approach consists of three steps: smoothing, thresholding, 2D and 3D connected component analysis. Whereas two first steps are rather common, the third step provides a set of general rules for the automatic extraction of the pharyngeal component. Our method requires less than one minute to extract the pharyngeal structures. The approach is evaluated quantitatively on 30 data sets using region-based and edge-based measures.

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