Precise delineation of target tumor is a key factor to ensure the effectiveness of radiation therapy. While hybrid positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) has become a standard imaging tool in the practice of radiation oncology, many existing automatic/semi-automatic methods still perform tumor segmentation on mono-modal images. In this paper, a co-clustering algorithm is proposed to concurrently segment 3D tumors in PET-CT images, considering that the two complementary imaging modalities can combine functional and anatomical information to improve segmentation performance. The theory of belief functions is adopted in the proposed method to model, fuse, and reason with uncertain and imprecise knowledge from noisy and blurry PET-CT images. To ensure reliable segmentation for each modality, the distance metric for the quantification of clustering distortions and spatial smoothness is iteratively adapted during the clustering procedure. On the other hand, to encourage consistent segmentation between different modalities, a specific context term is proposed in the clustering objective function. Moreover, during the iterative optimization process, clustering results for the two distinct modalities are further adjusted via a belief-functions-based information fusion strategy. The proposed method has been evaluated on a data set consisting of 21 paired PET-CT images for non-small cell lung cancer patients. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our proposed method performs well compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

The transferable belief model (TBM) is a model to represent quantified uncertainties based on belief functions, unrelated to any underlying probability model. In this framework, two main approaches to pattern classification have been developed: the TBM model-based classifier, relying on the general Bayesian theorem (GBT), and the TBM case-based classifier, built on the concept of similarity of a pattern to be classified with training patterns. Until now, these two methods seemed unrelated, and their connection with standard classification methods was unclear. This paper shows that both methods actually proceed from the same underlying principle, i.e., the GBT, and that they essentially differ by the nature of the assumed available information. This paper also shows that both methods collapse to a kernel rule in the case of precise and categorical learning data and for certain initial assumptions, and a simple relationship between basic belief assignments produced by the two methods is exhibited in a special case. These results shed new light on the issues of classification and supervised learning in the TBM. They also suggest new research directions and may help users in selecting the most appropriate method for each particular application, depending on the nature of the information at hand