Liver tumor segmentation based on level set

Liver tumor segmentation on computed tomography slices is a very difficult task because the medical images are often corrupted by noise and sampling artifacts. Besides, liver tumors are often surrounded by other abdominal structures with similar densities. Therefore, they often show the phenomenon of intensity inhomogeneity. These restrict the liver tumor segmentation. People tried to use traditional level set methods to segment the liver tumor, but the results were not satisfying due to the noise and the low gradient response on the liver tumor boundary. In this paper, we propose a multi-distribution level set method which can overcome the insufficient segmentation and over-segmentation problems. We have done many experiments and compared our approach with the CV model and LSACM model. We also use the proposed method to segment the public data set from the "3D Liver Tumor Segmentation Challenge". All results reveal that our method is better even for liver tumors with low contrast and blurred boundaries.