Multi‐atlas segmentation of the skeleton from whole‐body MRI—Impact of iterative background masking

Purpose To improve multi‐atlas segmentation of the skeleton from whole‐body MRI. In particular, we study the effect of employing the atlas segmentations to iteratively mask tissues outside of the region of interest to improve the atlas alignment and subsequent segmentation. Methods An improved atlas registration scheme is proposed. Starting from a suitable initial alignment, the alignment is refined by introducing additional stages of deformable...