Automatic segmentation of the diaphragm in non-contrast CT images

The diaphragm is a thin double-domed muscle that separates the thoracic and abdominal cavities. An accurate delineation of the diaphragm surface will be useful in providing a good region of interest for segmentation problems pertaining to the thoracic and abdominal cavities. In this paper, we present a fully automatic 3D graph-based method for the segmentation of the diaphragm in non-contrast CT data. In particular, we reformulate the diaphragm segmentation problem as an optimal surface segmentation problem in a volumetric graph. Comparison of the results obtained using our method with manual segmentations performed by an expert on non-contrast cardiac CT scans of 7 randomly selected patients indicated an overlap of 94.20 ± 0.01%.