A Structural Saliency-Based Approach for Automatic Intrahepatic Vascular Separation From Contrast-Enhanced Multi-Phase MR Images

Intrahepatic vascular separation on contrast-enhanced Magnetic Resonance (MR) images is indispensable for the hepatic tumor surgery. This paper presents an unsupervised frame-work based on structural saliency for automatically separating portal vein (PV) and hepatic vein (HV) from contrast-enhanced multi-phase MR images. In our work, we propose a new multi-scale filter based on statistics and shape information in the region of interest, called SSIROI, with which the vascular connectivity and saliency in the 3D hepatic region can be guaranteed. Experiments are conducted on clinical contrast-enhanced MR images, and the results show that our method achieves effective separation of intrahepatic vasculature by extracting the PV and HV from multi-phase images, and our proposed SSIROI filter outperforms state-of-the-art methods.