Fully automatic liver tumor segmentation from abdominal CT scans

Abstract

Liver cancer causes the majority of primary malignant liver tumors among adults. Computed Tomography (CT) scans are generally used to make the treatment plan or to prepare for ablation surgery. Processing CT image includes the automatic diagnosis of liver pathologies, such as detecting lesions and following vessels ramification, and 3D volume rendering. This paper presents a new fully automatic method to segment the tumors in liver structure with no interaction from user. Contrast enhancement is applied to the slices of segmented liver, then adding each image to itself to have a white image with some pepper noise and tumors as dark gray spots. After applying Gaussian smoothing, Isodata threshold is used to turn the image into binary with tumors as black spots on white background. Tests are reported on abdominal datasets showing promising result.