Real-time segmentation for tomographic imaging

In tomography, reconstruction and analysis is often performed once the acquisition has been completed due to the computational cost of the 3D imaging algorithms. In contrast, real-time reconstruction and analysis can avoid costly repetition of experiments and enable optimization of experimental parameters. Recently, it was shown that by reconstructing a subset of arbitrarily oriented slices, real-time quasi-3D reconstruction can be attained. Here, we extend this approach by including real-time segmentation, thereby enabling real-time analysis during the experiment. We propose to use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform real-time image segmentation and introduce an adapted training strategy in order to apply CNNs to arbitrarily oriented slices. We evaluate our method on both simulated and real-world data. The experiments show that our approach enables real-time tomographic segmentation for real-world applications and outperforms standard unsupervised segmentation methods.