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Multi-Atlas Segmentation Of The Facial Nerve, Bradley M. Gare

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Medical image segmentation is an important step to identify the shape and position of patient anatomy prior to surgical simulation, surgical rehearsal, and surgical planning. It is crucial that the facial nerve (FN) is segmented accurately as damage to this nerve can severely impact facial expression, speech, and taste. Manual segmentation provides accurate results but is time-consuming and labor-intensive; semi-automatic methods of segmentation are more feasible in a clinical setting and can provide accurate results with minimal user involvement. The objective of this work was to create a novel, open-source, multi-atlas based segmentation algorithm of the entire FN requiring minimal …