Atlas-based liver segmentation for nonhuman primate research

Abstract

Purpose-Certain viral infectious diseases cause systemic damage and the liver is an important organ affected directly by the virus and/or the hosts' response to the virus. Medical imaging indicates that the liver damage is heterogenous, therefore quantification of these changes requires analysis of the entire organ. Delineating the liver in preclinical imaging studies is a time consuming and difficult task that would benefit from automated liver segmentation.Methods-A nonhuman primate atlas-based liver segmentation method was developed to support quantitative image analysis of preclinical research. A set of 82 computed tomography (CT) scans of nonhuman primates with associated manual contours delineating the liver was generated from normal and abnormal livers. The proposed technique uses rigid and deformable registrations, a majority vote algorithm, and image post-processing operations to automate the liver segmentation