Assessing tumour vascularity with 3D contrast-enhanced ultrasound: A new semi-automated segmentation framework

Abstract

3D contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) is a powerful imaging technique for tumour vascularity assessment, which is critical for radio-frequency ablation (RFA) planning or for the assessment of response to antiangiogenic therapies. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-automated method for the quantification of tumour vascularity in 3D CEUS data. We apply a two-step framework combining an interactive segmentation of the tumour necrosis followed by an automatic detection of the vascularity based on implicit representations. Experimental results on 3D CEUS images of renal cell carcinomas (RCC) show that our method is promising in terms of speed and quality.