• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.305-305
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• 2005

In modern society, diseases are variously found. Also, disease can be fatal once starting attack or one misses the proper medical examination time. According to the development of society, our liver settled on exhausted status which causes high disease development ratio because of excess business, smoking and drinking. Especially liver related disease cannot be recovered, therefore it depends on internal organ transplant surgery. In this paper, calculate volume from rendered liver shape using 3-dimensional image processing method and we develop an image processing method for the image acquired by MDCT, that can simulate incision line decision according to blood vessel segmentation that can be used on liver transplant operation. Simulation results which adopt automatic liver segment abstraction algorithm show that it can help surgical operation.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.345-346
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• 2009

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.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.99-107
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• 2013

The surgical resection was occurred mainly in liver metastasis before the development of radiation therapy techniques. Recently, Radiation therapy is increased gradually due to the development of radiation dose delivery techniques. 18F-FDG PET image showed better sensitivity and specificity in liver metastasis detection. This image modality is important in the radiation treatment with planning CT for tumor delineation. In this study, we applied automatic image segmentation methods on PET image of liver metastasis and examined the impact of image factors on these methods. We selected the patients who were received the radiation therapy and 18F-FDG PET/CT in Korea Cancer Center Hospital from 2009 to 2012. Then, three kinds of image segmentation methods had been applied; The relative threshold method, the Gradient method and the region growing method. Based on these results, we performed statistical analysis in two directions. 1. comparison of GTV and image segmentation results. 2. performance of regression analysis for relation between image factor affecting image segmentation techniques. The mean volume of GTV was $60.9{\pm}65.9$ cc and the $GTV_{40%}$ was $22.43{\pm}35.27$ cc, and the $GTV_{50%}$ was $10.11{\pm}17.92$ cc, the $GTV_{RG}$ was $32.89{\pm}36.8$4 cc, the $GTV_{GD}$ was $30.34{\pm}35.77$ cc, respectively. The most similar segmentation method with the GTV result was the region growing method. For the quantitative analysis of the image factors which influenced on the region growing method, we used the standardized coefficient ${\beta}$, factors affecting the region growing method show GTV, $TumorSUV_{MAX/MIN}$, $SUV_{max}$, TBR in order. The result of the region growing (automatic segmentation) method showed the most similar result with the CT based GTV and the region growing method was affected by image factors. If we define the tumor volume by the auto image segmentation method which reflect the PET image parameters, more accurate and consistent tumor contouring can be done. And we can irradiate the optimized radiation dose to the cancer, ultimately.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.430-437
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• 2010

It is essential for living donor liver transplantation that surgeon must understand the hepatic vessel structure to improve the success rate of operation. In this paper, we extract the liver boundary without other surrounding structures such as heart, stomach, and spleen using the contrast enhanced MDCT liver image sequence. After that, we extract the major hepatic veins (left, middle, right hepatic vein) with morphological filter after review the basic structure of hepatic vessel which reside in segmented liver image region. The purpose of this study is provide the overall status of transplantation operation with size estimation of resection part which is dissected along with the middle hepatic vein. The method of liver extraction is as follows: firstly, we get rid of background and muscle layer with gray level distribution ratio from sampling process. secondly, the coincident images match with unit mesh image are unified with resulted image using the corse coordinate of liver and body. thirdly, we extract the final liver image after expanding and region filling. Using the segmented liver images, we extract the hepatic vessels with morphological filter and reversed the major hepatic vessels only with a results of ascending order of vessel size. The 3D reconstructed views of hepatic vessel are generated after applying the interpolation to provide the smooth view. These 3D view are used to estimate the dissection line after identify the middle hepatic vein. Finally, the volume of resection region is calculated and we can identify the possibility of successful transplantation operation.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.178-185
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• 2008

Living donor liver transplantation is increasingly performed as an alternative to cadaveric transplantation. Preoperative screening of the donor candidates is very important. The quality, size, and vascular and biliary anatomy of the liver are best assessed with magnetic resonance (MR) imaging or computed tomography (CT). In particular, the volume of the potential graft must be measured to ensure sufficient liver function after surgery. Preoperative liver segmentation has proved useful for measuring the graft volume before living donor liver transplantations in previous studies. In these studies, the liver segments were manually delineated on each image section. The delineated areas were multiplied by the section thickness to obtain volumes and summed to obtain the total volume of the liver segments. This process is tedious and time consuming. To compensate for this problem, automatic segmentation techniques have been proposed with multiplanar CT images. These methods involve the use of sequences of thresholding, morphologic operations (ie, mathematic operations, such as image dilation, erosion, opening, and closing, that are based on shape), and 3D region growing methods. These techniques are complex but require a few computation times. We made a phantom for volume measurement with pig and evaluated actual volume of spleen and liver of phantom. The results represent that our semiautomatic volume measurement algorithm shows a good accuracy and repeatability with actual volume of phantom and possibility for clinical use to assist physician as a measuring tool.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2016

Medical image processing is a compulsory process to diagnose many kinds of disease. Therefore, an automatic algorithm for this task is highly demanded as an important part to construct a computer-aided diagnosis system. In this paper, we introduce an automatic method to segment the liver region from 3D abdominal CT images using Otsu method. First, we choose a 2D slice which has most liver information from the whole 3D image. Secondly, on the chosen slice, we enhanced the image based on its intensity using Otsu method with multiple thresholds and use the threshold to enhance the whole 3D image. Then, we apply a liver mask to mark the candidate liver region. After that, we execute the Otsu method again to segment the liver region from the chosen slice and propagate the result to the whole 3D image. Finally, we apply preprocessing on the frontal side of 3D images to crop only the liver region from the image.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.171-176
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• 2005

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.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2020.11a
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• pp.1036-1038
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• 2020

This paper proposes a novel automated liver segmentation using Multi-Dilated U-Nets. The proposed multidilation segmentation model has the advantage of considering both local and global shapes of the liver image. We use the CT images subject-wise, every 2D image is concatenated to 3D to calculate the IOU score and DICE score. The experimental results on Jeonbuk National University hospital dataset achieves better performance than the conventional U-Net.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.8
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• pp.1765-1772
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• 2012

Success rate of transplantation of body organs improved due to development of medical equipment and diagnostic technology. In particular, a liver transplant due to liver dysfunction has increased. With the development of image processing and analysis to obtain the volume for liver transplantation have increased the accuracy and efficiency. In this thesis, we try to reconstruct the regions of the liver within three dimensional images using the mevislab tool, which is effective in quick comparison and analysis of various algorithms, and in expedient development of prototypes. Liver is divided by applying threshold values and region growing method to the original image, and by removing noise and unnecessary entities through morphology and region filling, and setting of areas of interest. It is deemed that high temporal efficiency, and presentation of diverse range of comparison and analysis module application methods through usage of MeVisLab would make contribution towards expanding of baseline of medical image processing researches.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2000.07a
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• pp.39-42
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• 2000

In our study, by observing and analyzing normal liver in abdominal CT image, we estimated gray value range and generated binary image. In the binary image, we achieved the number of hole which is located between pixels. Depending on the ratio, we processed the input image to 4 kinds of mesh images to remove the noise part that has the different ratio. With the Union image of 4 kinds of mesh images, we generated the template representing general outline of liver and subtracted from the binary image so the we can represent the organ boundary to be minute. With results of proposed method, processing time is reduced compared with existing method and we compared the result image to manual image of medical specialists.