Automatic segmentation of liver blood vessels using level set method

Abstract

Liver blood vessels play an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of the hepatic disease. In this paper, we present an automatic segmentation method of liver blood vessels from abdominal MDCT images using the level set method. Initialization of the level set function is the most important thing. For the flexible initialization, we segment the liver automatically using morphological filtering and an improved Otsu's threshold method, and then the liver boundary is used as the level set initialization. After segmenting, the liver and liver blood vessels 2D and 3D images are provided.