  A novel multi-atlas based image segmentation method is proposed by
integrating a semi-supervised label propagation method and a supervised random
forests method in a pattern recognition based label fusion framework. The
semi-supervised label propagation method takes into consideration local and
global image appearance of images to be segmented and segments the images by
propagating reliable segmentation results obtained by the supervised random
forests method. Particularly, the random forests method is used to train a
regression model based on image patches of atlas images for each voxel of the
images to be segmented. The regression model is used to obtain reliable
segmentation results to guide the label propagation for the segmentation. The
proposed method has been compared with state-of-the-art multi-atlas based image
segmentation methods for segmenting the hippocampus in MR images. The
experiment results have demonstrated that our method obtained superior
segmentation performance.
