Automatic Computation of Liver Volume from Living Donor for Liver Transplantation Procedure

Abstract

The proposed method aims to estimate liver volumes of donors, who are still alive, in the procedures of liver transplantation (LDLT). Manual estimation of liver volumes require manual tracing of liver borders and hence is a very time-consuming and tedious task. Accordingly, our objective is to develop an automatic, computer-aided system to correctly define the boundaries of livers of interest. In this study, a computer program is developed based on Mat lab for the management of CT liver scans. We use the region growing algorithm to demarcate the liver in CT images to obtain the volumetric measurements. In practice, the program carries out a high-performance 2D parallel pixel-growing algorithm to delineate the liver border from neighboring organs. The area measurements in all image slices depicting the liver of interest are summated as the final volumetric measurement. The estimated of liver volumes by our method are compared to manual measurements which were done by a radiologist. The experimental results suggest that the proposed computer-aided system is reliable and can finish the computation in satisfactory speed.