Fully automatic liver segmentation for contrast-enhanced CT images

Abstract

Abstract. The need for fast and precise segmentation has increased recently due to the spread of systems for computer aided diagnosis and therapy planning. The manual segmentation of the liver is very time consuming, so it is desired to develop a method that can precisely segment the liver without any human interaction. In this paper we propose a fully automatic method for liver segmentation on contrast-enhanced (portal venous) CT images. Our method is essentially an advanced regiongrowing the result of that is improved by various pre- and post-processing steps, like intensity based ROI detection, separation of liver and heart, additional segmentation at the right lung lobe, vessel (IVC) removal, and cavity filling. According to our experiments the method can efficiently segment the liver parenchyma in many cases, however, in some cases the result may exclude very large lesions. 1