Segmentation and 3D visualization of liver, lesions and major blood vessels in abdomen CTA images

The three dimensional (3D) imaging plays a vital role in rapidly emerging field of computer assisted surgical planning which includes minimally invasive surgery, targeted drug delivery and tumor resection. In case of liver tumor patients, for considering all these applications the surgeon must know the patho-anatomical relationship of hepatic tumor with respect to the major blood vessels. This paper presents the implementation of algorithms for segmentation of liver, lesions and major blood vessels from tri-phase CT images. The proposed algorithm uses fuzzy clustering based active contours segmentation techniques which require minimal human intervention and it does not compromise the accuracy of the segmented results. Later the segmented structures are visualized in three dimensions (3D). The performance comparison of the proposed algorithm with other state of art algorithms demonstrates its robustness in segmenting low contrast and inhomogeneous lesions and blood vessels in CTA images.