Authors:
Dário A. B. Oliveira
1
;
Raul Q. Feitosa
1
and
Mauro M. Correia
2
Affiliations:
1
Department of Electric Engineering, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
;
2
Unigranrio and National Cancer Institute-INCA, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Medical Imaging, Liver Segmentation, Computer Tomography, Level Sets, Genetic Algorithms.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Image and Video Analysis
;
Segmentation and Grouping
;
Surface Geometry and Shape
Abstract:
This paper presents a method based on level sets to segment the liver using Computer Tomography (CT) images. Initially, the liver boundary is manually set in one slice as an initial solution, and then the method automatically segments the liver in all other slices, sequentially. In each step of iteration it fits a Gaussian curve to the liver histogram to model the speed image in which the level sets propagates. The parameters of our method were estimated using Genetic Algorithms (GA) and a database of reference segmentations. The method was tested using 20 different exams and five different measures of performance, and the results obtained confirm the potential of the method. The cases in which the method presented a poor performance are also discussed in order to instigate further research.