Topology-Preserving STAPLE

Methodology for fusing multiple segmentations to pro-duce an improved result has been useful in computational anatomical studies. Although obtaining segmentations of anatomy having a particular topology are essential to stud-ies using diffeomorphic deformation based analyses, no methods of label fusion presented to date have incorporated information regarding the topology of the anatomy. In this paper, we introduce “Topology STAPLE”, a novel method that statistically fuses multiple rater segmentations into a topologically correct segmentation. We evaluate the method on both simulated data and real delineations of the cerebel-lum produced by human raters. 1