Automatic liver segmentation from multiphase CT images by using level set method

Abstract

Segmentation of liver from Multi-phase CT images is one of the essential technology for computer aided diagnosis. Contrast medium gives multi-phase CT images different intensity feature which enables to detect tumor. It is a challenging problem to segment liver region from multi-phase CT images. There are many approaches for solving this problem, however, these methods depend on other phases or registration. In order to solve this problem, we propose anatomy feature-based method which is mostly independent for each phase in this paper. This method uses level set method for final segmentation. The accuracy of segmentation result by level set methods relay on initial contour, so we preprocess initial region of liver by anatomical feature. Then we introduced contour constrain by using ribs information to improve segmentaion accuracy. Our segmentation was evaluated on 5 multi-phase CT images which have 4 phases. Experimental results show that the proposed method is good accuracy for each phase.