Conflict management in the fusion of complementary segmentations of deformed kidneys and nephroblastoma.

The fusion of multiple segmentations aims to improve their accuracy in order to make them exploitable. However, conflicts may appear. In this paper, two conflict-management models are proposed for the fusion of complementary segmentations. This conflict-management and fusion procedure, integrated into the SAIAD project, carries out the fusion of deformed kidneys and nephroblastoma using the combination of six independent methods. These methods are based on different criteria, like the adjacent segmented slices, the variation of information, the Dice, the neighbouring labels, the pixel intensity by scanner images, and the fully connected CRFs. The performances of our fusion models was evaluated on 139 scans for three patients with nephroblastoma, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness and the improvement of the resulting segmentations.