A Post Smoothing Algorithm for Vessel Segmentation

The segmentation of vessel including portal vein, hepatic vein and artery, from Computed Tomography (CT) images plays an important role in the therapeutic strategies for hepatic diseases. Representing segmented vessels in three dimensional spaces is extremely useful for doctors to plan liver surgery. In this paper, proposed method is focused on smoothing technique of segmented 3D liver vessels, which derived from 3D region growing approach. A pixel expand algorithm has been developed first to avoid vessel lose and disconnection cased by the next smoothing technique. And then a binary volume filtering technique has been implemented and applied to make the segmented binary vessel volume qualitatively smoother. This strategy uses an iterative relaxation process to extract isosurfaces from binary volumes while retaining anatomical structure and important features in the volume. Hard and irregular place in volume image has been eliminated as shown in the result part, which also demonstrated that proposed method is a suitable smoothing solution for post processing of fine vessel segmentation.