Hybrid positron emission tomography segmentation of heterogeneous lung tumors using 3D Slicer: improved GrowCut algorithm with threshold initialization.

This paper presents an improved GrowCut (IGC), a positron emission tomography-based segmentation algorithm, and tests its clinical applicability. Contrary to the traditional method that requires the user to provide the initial seeds, the IGC algorithm starts with a threshold-based estimate of the tumor and a three-dimensional morphologically grown shell around the tumor as the foreground and background seeds, respectively. The repeatability of IGC from the same observer at multiple time points was compared with the traditional GrowCut algorithm.