Scale-adaptive supervoxel-based random forests for liver tumor segmentation in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans

Purpose Toward an efficient clinical management of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), we propose a classification framework dedicated to tumor necrosis rate estimation from dynamic contrast-enhanced CT scans. Based on machine learning, it requires weak interaction efforts to segment healthy, active and necrotic liver tissues. Methods Our contributions are two-fold. First, we apply random forest (RF) on supervoxels using multi-phase supervoxel-based features that discriminate tissues based on their dynamic in response to contrast agent injection. Second, we extend this technique in a hierarchical multi-scale fashion to deal with multiple spatial extents and appearance heterogeneity. It translates in an adaptive data sampling scheme combining RF and hierarchical multi-scale tree resulting from recursive supervoxel decomposition. By concatenating multi-phase features across the hierarchical multi-scale tree to describe leaf supervoxels, we enable RF to automatically infer the most informative scales without defining any explicit rules on how to combine them. Results Assessment on clinical data confirms the benefits of multi-phase information embedded in a multi-scale supervoxel representation for HCC tumor segmentation. Conclusion Dedicated but not limited only to HCC management, both contributions reach further steps toward more accurate multi-label tissue classification.