An enhanced random walk algorithm for delineation of head and neck cancers in PET studies

An algorithm for delineating complex head and neck cancers in positron emission tomography (PET) images is presented in this article. An enhanced random walk (RW) algorithm with automatic seed detection is proposed and used to make the segmentation process feasible in the event of inhomogeneous lesions with bifurcations. In addition, an adaptive probability threshold and a k-means based clustering technique have been integrated in the proposed enhanced RW algorithm. The new threshold is capable of following the intensity changes between adjacent slices along the whole cancer volume, leading to an operator-independent algorithm. Validation experiments were first conducted on phantom studies:…