Automatic segmentation of liver region through blood vessels on multi-phase CT

Recently four phases CT has been widely used for diagnosing liver diseases, especially cancer. This paper describes an automatic method for segmenting the liver region from third phase abdominal CT. First, blood vessels in the liver are extracted with a threshold. Then morphological dilation enables us to define an approximate liver region, which is found to be very useful for removing abutting organs. The final liver region is extracted with a threshold. Experiments were conducted for eight CT data. The extracted regions agree well with those detected manually.