New automatic liver segmentation and extraction method

Abstract

Liver segmentation is critical in designing and developing computer-assisted systems that have been used for liver disease diagnosis before surgery or transplantation. The purpose of this study is to develop a computerized system for extracting liver contours and reconstructing liver volume using contrast-enhanced hepatic CT images. The automatic liver segmentation method adopted the graph optimal algorithm with ratio contour as its salient measure. This new cost function encoded the Gestalt laws and synthesized the gap length, the liver region area, the length of the closed contour and the average curvature of the closed boundary. With the extracted liver contours, a promising system to exclude tissues outside the liver was developed. It promised to save time and simplify liver volume reconstruction by minimizing intervention operations. Some 3D-rendered reconstruction results were also created to demonstrate the final results of our system.