Towards Clinical Deployment of Automated Anatomical Regions-Of-Interest.

The purpose of this work is to investigate, and improve, the feasibility of advanced Region Of Interest (ROI) selection schemes in clinical volume rendering. In particular, this work implements and evaluates an Automated Anatomical ROI (AA-ROI) approach based on the combination of automatic image registration (AIR) and Distance-Based Transfer Functions (DBTFs), designed for automatic selection of complex anatomical shapes without relying on prohibitive amounts of interaction. Domain knowledge and clinical experience has been included in the project through participation of practicing radiologists in all phases of the project. This has resulted in a set of requirements that are critical for Direct Volume Rendering applications to be utilized in clinical practice and a prototype AA-ROI implementation that was developed to addresses critical points in existing solutions. The feasibility of the developed approach was assessed through a study where five radiologists investigated three medical data sets with complex ROIs, using both traditional tools and the developed prototype software. Our analysis indicate that advanced, registration based ROI schemes could increase clinical efficiency in time-critical settings for cases with complex ROIs, but also that their clinical feasibility is conditional with respect to the radiologists trust in the registration process and its application to the data.