Abstract
Segmentation is a key step in analyzing and processing medical images. Due to the low fault tolerance in medical imaging, manual segmentation remains the de facto standard in this domain. Besides, efforts to automate the segmentation process often rely on large amounts of manually labeled data. While existing software supporting manual segmentation is rich in features and delivers accurate results, the necessary time to set it up and get comfortable using it can pose a hurdle for the collection of large datasets. This work introduces a client/server based online environment, referred to as Studierfenster (studierfenster.at), that can be used to perform manual segmentations directly in a web browser. The aim of providing this functionality in the form of a web application is to ease the collection of ground truth segmentation datasets. Providing a tool that is quickly accessible and usable on a broad range of devices, offers the potential to accelerate this process. The manual segmentation workflow of Studierfenster consists of dragging and dropping the input file into the browser window and slice-by-slice outlining the object under consideration. The final segmentation can then be exported as a file storing its contours and as a binary segmentation mask. In order to evaluate the usability of Studierfenster, a user study was performed. The user study resulted in a mean of 6.3 out of 7.0 possible points given by users, when asked about their overall impression of the tool. The evaluation also provides insights into the results achievable with the tool in practice, by presenting two ground truth segmentations performed by physicians.
Abstract (translated)
分割是医学图像分析和处理的关键环节。由于医学成像中的容错性较低，人工分割仍然是这一领域的事实标准。此外，自动化分割过程的工作通常依赖于大量手动标记的数据。虽然支持手动分割的现有软件功能丰富，提供了准确的结果，但设置和舒适使用它所需的时间可能会对收集大型数据集构成障碍。这项工作介绍了一个基于客户机/服务器的在线环境，称为studierfenster（studierfenster.at），可用于直接在Web浏览器中执行手动分段。以Web应用程序的形式提供此功能的目的是简化地面实况分段数据集的收集。提供一种能够在多种设备上快速访问和使用的工具，提供了加速这一过程的潜力。studierfenster的手动分割工作流程包括将输入文件拖放到浏览器窗口中，并逐段显示所考虑的对象。最后的分割可以导出为存储其轮廓的文件和二进制分割遮罩。为了评价studierfenster的可用性，进行了用户研究。当被问及用户对该工具的总体印象时，用户研究得出的7.0个可能点的平均值为6.3。评估还提供了对实践中使用该工具可实现的结果的见解，通过呈现由医师执行的两个基本事实分段。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08610
