Title
Automated segmentation of hepatic vessel trees in non-contrast X-ray CT images
Abstract
Hepatic vessel trees are the key structures in the liver. Knowledge of the hepatic vessel trees is important for liver surgery planning and hepatic disease diagnosis such as portal hypertension. However, hepatic vessels cannot be easily distinguished from other liver tissues in non-contrast CT images. Automated segmentation of hepatic vessels in non-contrast CT images is a challenging issue. In this paper, an approach for automated segmentation of hepatic vessels trees in non-contrast X-ray CT images is proposed. Enhancement of hepatic vessels is performed using two techniques: (1) histogram transformation based on a Gaussian window function; (2) multi-scale line filtering based on eigenvalues of Hessian matrix. After the enhancement of hepatic vessels, candidate of hepatic vessels are extracted by thresholding. Small connected regions of size less than 100 voxels are considered as false-positives and are removed from the process. This approach is applied to 20 cases of non-contrast CT images. Hepatic vessel trees segmented from the contrast-enhanced CT images of the same patient are used as the around truth in evaluating the performance of the proposed segmentation method. Results show that the proposed method can enhance and segment the hepatic vessel regions in non-contrast CT images correctly.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1117/12.710343
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF PHOTO-OPTICAL INSTRUMENTATION ENGINEERS (SPIE)
Keywords
Field
DocType
non-contrast X-ray CT images,hepatic vessels,human body segmentation,image processing
Nuclear medicine,Voxel,Histogram,Portal hypertension,Segmentation,Surgery planning,Computed tomography,Medical diagnostics,Thresholding,Radiology,Medicine
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
6512
0277-786X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
7
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
suguru kawajiri110.39
Xiangrong Zhou232545.53
Xuejun Zhang37016.55
Takeshi Hara463979.10
Hiroshi Fujita511824.65
Ryujiro Yokoyama612318.40
hiroshi kondo710.39
Masayuki Kanematsu89017.09
Hiroaki Hoshi910618.21