Centroid calculation for a connected component in 3D volume using Matlab - matlab

Question

I am trying to implement brain tumor segmentation on 3D brain MRI(.mha data type).
After preliminary segmentation, I am applying 26-neighbor connected component algorithm(using bwconncomp) to obtain the largest connected component by obtaining the component with the largest volume, following which I need to calculate the centroid of the resultant component.
I am not sure if my method of calculating the largest connected component and the centroid is correct, because the centroid obtained and its nearby voxels all have value 0.
Also I am having confusion with the representation of 3D voxel coordinates. For eg. if centroid=(x,y,z), does it correspond to x=row,y=column and z=2D slice?
Any help would be appreciated. Below is my code with the relevant part.
CC=bwconncomp(Ibin,26); %Input Black & White 3D data of size 240x240x155
Pixelid=regionprops(CC,'PixelIdxList');
[prow pcol]=size(Pixelid);
maxval=numel(Pixelid(1).PixelIdxList);
index=1;
for i=1:prow
number=numel([Pixelid(i).PixelIdxList]);
if (number>maxval) %calculating the component with max number of voxels
maxval=number;
index=i;
end
end
for i=1:prow
if i~=index
Ibin(Pixelid(i).PixelIdxList)=0;
end
end
CC1=bwconncomp(Ibin,26);
Cent=regionprops(CC1,'Centroid');

Answer 1

I changed your code to the following:
CC=bwconncomp(Ibin,26);
PixelIdxList = CC.PixelIdxList;
maxval = numel(PixelIdxList{1});
index = 1;
for ii = 1:length(PixelIdxList)
number = numel(PixelIdxList{ii});
if number > maxval
maxval = number;
index = ii;
end
end
[y,x,z] = ind2sub(size(Ibin),PixelIdxList{index})
centroid = [mean(x), mean(y), mean(z)];
bwconncomp already gives you a PixelIdxList so you don't have to use regionprops. The PixelIdxList lists pixels by their linear indices, so you have to convert them into subscripts to get x, y, and z coordinates. The first dimension in MATLAB matrix represents y coordinates, and second dimension represents x, while the third dimension represents z. Centroid is calculated by taking the mean x, y, and z coordinates of all the pixels contained in the object.