FEM-based automatic segmentation of muscle and fat tissues from thoracic CT images

The estimation of body composition (i.e., proportions of muscle and fat tissues) in cancer patients has important clinical and research applications. In particular, chemotherapy drug dosage is determined after taking into account the muscle and fat proportions in the patient´s body. Recently, there has been considerable interest in studying the correlation between survival and body composition in cancer patients. We propose a fully automated framework for segmentation and quantification of muscle and fat tissues in thoracic CT images. A novel approach based on statistical deformation model (SDM) constrained deformable registration using the finite element method (FEM) is proposed. We obtained very good segmentation results with Jaccard scores of 94.95% for muscle and 94.82% for fat tissues respectively on a large data set of 116 thoracic CT images.