Automatic organ localizations on 3D CT images by using majority-voting of multiple 2D detections based on local binary patterns and Haar-like features

This paper describes an approach to accomplish the fast and automatic localization of the different inner organ regions on 3D CT scans. The proposed approach combines object detections and the majority voting technique to achieve the robust and quick organ localization. The basic idea of proposed method is to detect a number of 2D partial appearances of a 3D target region on CT images from multiple body directions, on multiple image scales, by using multiple feature spaces, and vote all the 2D detecting results back to the 3D image space to statistically decide one 3D bounding rectangle of the target organ. Ensemble learning was used to train the multiple 2D detectors based on template matching on local binary patterns and Haar-like feature spaces. A collaborative voting was used to decide the corner coordinates of the 3D bounding rectangle of the target organ region based on the coordinate histograms from detection results in three body directions. Since the architecture of the proposed method (multiple independent detections connected to a majority voting) naturally fits the parallel computing paradigm and multi-core CPU hardware, the proposed algorithm was easy to achieve a high computational efficiently for the organ localizations on a whole body CT scan by using general-purpose computers. We applied this approach to localization of 12 kinds of major organ regions independently on 1,300 torso CT scans. In our experiments, we randomly selected 300 CT scans (with human indicated organ and tissue locations) for training, and then, applied the proposed approach with the training results to localize each of the target regions on the other 1,000 CT scans for the performance testing. The experimental results showed the possibility of the proposed approach to automatically locate different kinds of organs on the whole body CT scans.