• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.43 no.6
• /
• pp.434-440
• /
• 2022

Liver transplantation is a critical used treatment method for patients with end-stage liver disease. The number of cases of living donor liver transplantation is increasing due to the imbalance in needs and supplies for brain-dead organ donation. As a result, the importance of the accuracy of the donor's suitability evaluation is also increasing rapidly. To measure the donor's liver volume accurately is the most important, that is absolutely necessary for the recipient's postoperative progress and the donor's safety. Therefore, we propose liver segmentation in abdominal CT images from pre-operation, POD 7, and POD 63 with a two-dimensional U-Net. In addition, we introduce an algorithm to measure the volume of the segmented liver and measure the hepatectomy rate and regeneration rate of pre-operation, POD 7, and POD 63. The performance for the learning model shows the best results in the images from pre-operation. Each dataset from pre-operation, POD 7, and POD 63 has the DSC of 94.55 ± 9.24%, 88.40 ± 18.01%, and 90.64 ± 14.35%. The mean of the measured liver volumes by trained model are 1423.44 ± 270.17 ml in pre-operation, 842.99 ± 190.95 ml in POD 7, and 1048.32 ± 201.02 ml in POD 63. The donor's hepatectomy rate is an average of 39.68 ± 13.06%, and the regeneration rate in POD 63 is an average of 14.78 ± 14.07%.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
• /
• 2002.04a
• /
• pp.763-766
• /
• 2002

오늘날 CT나 MR 등을 통한 의학 영상 기술과 컴퓨터 성능의 향상으로 인체 내부 장기의 영상을 비교적 용이하게 얻을 수 있으며 얻어진 영상 정보는 컴퓨터로 수치화되므로 데이터의 조작 및 가공 또한 용이하다. 그러나, 이 데이터는 2D 슬라이스(slice)들의 연속으로 표현되므로 이것을 보다 가시화, 조작, 분석이 용이한 상태로 바꾸기 위해서는 3 차원 구조로의 재구성이 필요하게 된다. 이것을 위하여 무엇보다도 먼저 CT 나 MR 을 통하여 얻어진 영상을 분석하여 특정장기(organ)의 영상 부분을 다른 조직의 영상부분으로부터 분리(segmentation)할 필요가 있다. 이러한 Segmentation방법에는 여러가지가 있는데, 수작업의 결합 등으로 인해서 비효율적일 수 밖에 없는 문제점을 가지고 있다. 이에 본 논문은 보다 효율적인 segmentation 의 처리를 위하여 구역확장(region-growing) 기법을 응용한 새로운 segmentation 방법을 개발하였다. 그리하여, 본 논문이 제안한 알고리즘을 슬라이스 간격이 큰 2 차원 복부 CT 영상에 적용시켜 간(liver)의 추출을 시도하였고 3차원 표현 결과를 확인할 수 있었다.

• Progress in Medical Physics
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.99-107
• /
• 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 the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.16 no.8
• /
• pp.1765-1772
• /
• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
• /
• v.17 no.3
• /
• pp.51-57
• /
• 2012

Hepatic vessel tree is the key structure for hepatic disease diagnosis and liver surgery planning. Especially, it is used to evaluate the donors' and recipients' liver for the LDLT(Living Donors Liver Transplantation) and estimate the volumes of left and right hepatic lobes for securing their life in the LDLT. In this study, we propose a method to apply canny edge detection that is not affected by noise to the liver images for automatic segmentation of hepatic vessels tree in contrast abdominal MDCT image. Using histograms and average pixel values of the various liver CT images, optimized parameters of the Canny algorithm are determined. It is more time-efficient to use the common parameters than to change parameters manually according to CT images. Candidates of hepatic vessels are extracted by threshold filtering around the detected the vessel edge. Finally, using a system which detects the true-negatives and the false-positives in horizontal and vertical direction, the true-negatives are added in candidate of hepatic vessels and the false-positives are removed. As a result of the process, the various hepatic vessel trees of patients are accurately reconstructed in 3D.

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

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

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.41 no.1
• /
• pp.48-54
• /
• 2020

In this paper, we deal with a liver fibrosis classification problem using ultrasound B-mode images. Commonly representative methods for classifying the stages of liver fibrosis include liver biopsy and diagnosis based on ultrasound images. The overall liver shape and the smoothness and roughness of speckle pattern represented in ultrasound images are used for determining the fibrosis stages. Although the ultrasound image based classification is used frequently as an alternative or complementary method of the invasive biopsy, it also has the limitations that liver fibrosis stage decision depends on the image quality and the doctor's experience. With the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, several studies using deep learning methods have been carried out for automated liver fibrosis classification and showed superior performance of high accuracy. The performance of those deep learning methods depends closely on the amount of datasets. We propose an enhanced U-net architecture to maximize the classification accuracy with limited small amount of image datasets. U-net is well known as a neural network for fast and precise segmentation of medical images. We design it newly for the purpose of classifying liver fibrosis stages. In order to assess the performance of the proposed architecture, numerical experiments are conducted on a total of 118 ultrasound B-mode images acquired from 78 patients with liver fibrosis symptoms of F0~F4 stages. The experimental results support that the performance of the proposed architecture is much better compared to the transfer learning using the pre-trained model of VGGNet.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.38 no.2
• /
• pp.179-190
• /
• 2001

In this proposed study, observing and analyzing contrast enhanced abdominal CT images, we segmented the liver automatically. We computed the ratio of each gray value from the estimated gray value range. With the average value of mesh image, we distinguished the liver from the noise parts. We divided the region based on immersion simulation. The threshold value is determined from the mesh image which is generated from each gray value portion of the liver and is used in dividing the liver to the noise region. To get the outline of the liver, we generated template image which represents the lump of the liver, and subtracted it from the binary image. With the results we use the proposed algorithm using 8-connectivity instead of the present opening algorithm, to reduce the processing time. We computed the volume from the segmented organ size and presented a clinical demonstration with the animal experiment

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
• /
• v.25 no.3
• /
• pp.189-194
• /
• 2004

Pixel values of contrast enhanced computed tomography (CE-CT) images are randomly changed. Also, the middle liver part has a problem to segregate the liver structure because of similar gray-level values of a pancreas in the abdomen. In this paper, an automatic liver segmentation method using a partial histogram threshold (PHT) algorithm is proposed for overcoming randomness of CE-CT images and removing the pancreas. After histogram transformation, adaptive multi-modal threshold is used to find the range of gray-level values of the liver structure. Also, the PHT algorithm is performed for removing the pancreas. Then, morphological filtering is processed for removing of unnecessary objects and smoothing of the boundary. Four CE-CT slices of eight patients were selected to evaluate the proposed method. As the average of normalized average area of the automatic segmented method II (ASM II) using the PHT and manual segmented method (MSM) are 0.1671 and 0.1711, these two method shows very small differences. Also, the average area error rate between the ASM II and MSM is 6.8339 ％. From the results of experiments, the proposed method has similar performance as the MSM by medical Doctor.