Abdominal organ recognition using 3D mathematical morphology

We describe a method for automatic recognition of abdominal organs such as kidneys, spleen, stomach, and liver from computerised tomography (CT) images using 3D mathematical morphology. Morphological approaches provide the theory and tools to analyze shapes directly. This characteristic enables analyzing and recognizing abdominal organs according to size and gray level features. Our system consists of extraction part and recognition part. Differential top-hats and conditional dilation are used for the extraction part. Also a combination of recursive erosion and geodesic influence is found to be effective for separating touched organs. Recognition is based on a simple likelihood decision with organ´s position and size. We obtained a recognition rate of about 91% for nine organs of four CT images