3D Volumetric CT Liver Segmentation Using Hybrid Segmentation Techniques

The first step for computer-aided diagnosis for liver of CT scans is the identification of liver region. To deal with multislice CT scans, automatic liver segmentation is required. In this paper, we propose a liver segmentation algorithm using hybrid techniques by combining morphological-based, region-based and histogram-based techniques to segment volumetric CT data. A morphological-based technique is used to find the initial liver tissue from the first slice which is set as a starting slice and region-based is used for further processing for the rest slices, which incorporates seed point generation from Euclidean distance transform (EDT) image on the previous slice for region growing on the current slice. In order to remove neighboring abdominal organs of the liver which connect to the liver organ, the histogram-based technique is used by finding the left and right histogram tail threshold (HTT) and we repeat the use of morphology filtering and large contour detecting for liver smoothing.