Med Phys
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The authors evaluate the performance of shape-based averaging (SBA) technique for whole-body bone segmentation from MRI in the context of MRI-guided attenuation correction (MRAC) in hybrid PET/MRI. To enhance the performance of the SBA scheme, the authors propose to combine it with statistical atlas fusion techniques. Moreover, a fast and efficient shape comparison-based atlas selection scheme was developed and incorporated into the SBA method. ⋯ The performance of SBA was enhanced through application of local atlas weighting or regularization schemes (L-STAPLE and L-Shp). Bone recognition, fragmentation of the contiguous structures, and quantitative PET uptake recovery improved dramatically using these methods while the proposed L-Shp method significantly reduced the computation time.