3D Slicer as a tool for interactive brain tumor segmentation

User interaction is required for reliable segmentation of brain tumors in clinical practice and in clinical research. By incorporating current research tools, 3D Slicer provides a set of interactive, easy to use tools that can be efficiently used for this purpose. One of the modules of 3D Slicer is an interactive editor tool, which contains a variety of interactive segmentation effects. Use of these effects for fast and reproducible segmentation of a single glioblastoma from magnetic resonance imaging data is demonstrated. The innovation in this work lies not in the algorithm, but in the accessibility of the algorithm because of its integration into a software platform that is practical for research in a clinical setting.

Introduction

DUE to the large variability in composition and appearance of brain tumors, no current automated tools have been shown to provide robust automatic segmentation of these lesions. Therefore, the state of the art in clinical practice is manual or semi-automated segmentation. Usability by the target audience as a key design requirement for such tools. The segmentation results can be used for quantitative analysis or for generating three-dimensional surface models for image guided neuronavigation.