Automatic slice growing method based 3D reconstruction of liver with its vessels

Abstract

In the recent years, reconstructing 3D liver and its vessels from abdominal CT volume images becomes an inevitable and necessary research field. In this paper, a method of 3D reconstruction of liver with its vessels has been implemented, which involves volume preprocessing, de-noising, segmentation, contouring, and combination of different modalities. An advanced liver segmentation algorithms have been proposed: The first one is a 2.5D method that utilizes automatic Slice Growing Method (SGM) to segment liver part of each slice of a data set. It takes advantage of curvature control of level set segmentation method to distinguish liver and adjacent organs. It is proved that the result of this proposed method is much better than simple 3D level set method in liver segmentation. In the case of liver vessel segmentation, we have proposed an improved smoothing method dedicate to 3D vascular volume which results from region growing segmentation method. The cooperation of region growing method and proposed smoothing method has been demonstrated the possibility of efficient vessel segmentation with very accurate results. And the results indicate that our method is suitable for anatomical studying and surgical planning.