Semi-Automatic Segmentation Methods for 3-D Visualization and Analysis of the Liver

Pre-evaluation of donors prior to surgery of living donated liver transplantation is one of the challenging applications that computer aided systems are needed. The precise measurement of liver volume requires effective segmentation procedures, while three dimensional rendering of the segmented data provides demonstrative information to radiologists and surgeons before surgery. The Insight Toolkit provides effective algorithms for segmentation, which are also optimized for high computational performance and processing time. Furthermore, An ITK pipeline can be combined with a VTK pipeline, so that the result of segmentation can be represented directly in 3-D using VTK. Therefore, there is an on-going trend for developing ITK/VTK based systems. This study presents quantitative and qualitative performance evaluation of two effective ITK algorithms on segmentation of liver from CTA data sets.