Automatic Liver Segmentation of a Contrast Enhanced CT Image Using an Improved Partial Histogram Threshold Algorithm

This paper proposes an automatic liver segmentation method using improved partial histogram threshold (PHT) algorithms. This method removes neighboring abdominal organs regardless of random pixel variation of contrast enhanced CT images. Adaptive multi-modal threshold is first performed to extract a region of interest (ROI). A left PHT (LPHT) algorithm is processed to remove the pancreas, spleen, and left kidney. Then a right PHT (RPHT) algorithm is performed for eliminating the right kidney from the ROI. Finally, binary morphological filtering is processed for removing of unnecessary objects and smoothing of the ROI boundary. Ten CT slices of six patients (60 slices) were selected to evaluate the proposed method. As evaluation measures, an average normalized area and area error rate were used. From the experimental results, the proposed automatic liver segmentation method has strong similarity performance as the MSM by medical Doctor.