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arXiv · 2312.05887

Three-dimensional numerical schemes for the segmentation of the psoas muscle in X-ray computed tomography images

Giulio Paolucci·Isabella Cama·Cristina Campi·Michele Piana
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Abstract

The analysis of the psoas muscle in morphological and functional imaging has proved to be an accurate approach to assess sarcopenia, i.e. a systemic loss of skeletal muscle mass and function that may be correlated to multifactorial etiological aspects. The inclusion of sarcopenia assessment into a radiological workflow would need the implementation of computational pipelines for image processing that guarantee segmentation reliability and a significant degree of automation. The present study utilizes three-dimensional numerical schemes for psoas segmentation in low-dose X-ray computed tomography images. Specifically, here we focused on the level set methodology and compared the performances of two standard approaches, a classical evolution model and a three-dimension geodesic model, with the performances of an original first-order modification of this latter one. The results of this analysis show that these gradient-based schemes guarantee reliability with respect to manual segmentation and that the first-order scheme requires a computational burden that is significantly smaller than the one needed by the second-order approach.

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Giulio Paolucci, Isabella Cama, Cristina Campi, Michele Piana. 2023-12-10. Three-dimensional numerical schemes for the segmentation of the psoas muscle in X-ray computed tomography images. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05887

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