MEDICAL IMAGE SEGMENTATION FOR ANATOMICAL KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION

Abstract

Computed Tomography-Angiography (CTA) images of the abdomen, followed by precise segmentation and subsequent computation of shape based features of liver play an important role in hepatic surgery, patient/donor diagnosis during liver transplantation and at various treatment stages. Nevertheless, the issues like intensity similarity and Partial Volume Effect (PVE) between the neighboring organs; left the task of liver segmentation critical. The accurate segmentation of liver helps the surgeons to perfectly classify the patients based on their liver anatomy which in turn helps them in the treatment decision phase. In this study, we propose an effective Advanced Region Growing (ARG) algorithm for segmentation of liver from CTA images. The performance of the proposed technique was tested with several CTA images acquired across a wide range of patients. The proposed ARG algorithm identifies the liver regions on the images based on the statistical features (intensity distribution) and orientation value. The proposed technique addressed the aforementioned issues and been evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively. For quantitative analysis proposed method was compared with manual segmentation (gold standard). The method was also compared with standard region growing.