Automatic Abdominal Organ Segmentation from CT images

Abstract

In the recent years a great deal of research work has been devoted to the development of semi-automatic
and automatic techniques for the analysis of abdominal CT images. Some of the current interests are the
automatic diagnosis of liver, spleen, and kidney pathologies and the 3D volume rendering of the abdominal
organs. The first and fundamental step in all these studies is the automatic organs segmentation, that is still
an open problem. In this paper we propose our fully automatic system that employs a hierarchical gray
level based framework to segment heart, bones (i.e. ribs and spine), liver and its blood vessels, kidneys, and
spleen. The overall system has been evaluated on the data of 100 patients, obtaining a good assessment both
by visual inspection by three experts, and by comparing the computed results to the boundaries manually
traced by experts.