EE574:3D Liver Vessel Segmentation

Vessel segmentation is one of the challenging tasks in the field of image analysis. This paper gives a comprehensive study for liver vessel segmentation of 3D images. The main goal is to segment the liver vessels in a given 3D DICOM image of the abdomen. We proposed a cascaded liver segmentation structure such that we first extracted the liver region from the abdomen, then vessel enhancement is performed in order to refine the tubular structures in the extracted liver region. Then, we apply thresholding to detect initial contour which is later used for the initialization of the level set active contour. Lastly, we applied a level set active contour to segment the vessels inside the liver. In this study, we examined various techniques for each of the segmentation structure cascade such as vessel enhancement and level set active contour. Finally, we compared these techniques and select the most appropriate ones to build up our final segmentation structure.