Liver vasculature refinement with multiple 3D structuring element shapes

Delineating anatomical structures and other regions of interest is an important component of assisting and automating specific diagnostic, radiological, and surgical tasks. In this paper, a segmentation approach for liver region delineation is proposed, which is based on hysteresis thresholding followed by texture analysis with statistical moments. After that, the region growing method is applied to extract a hepatic vessel tree followed by hepatic vasculature refinement with multiple 3D structuring element shapes. The structure and morphology of the vascular network and its relationship with tumors and liver segments are of major interest to surgeons planning liver surgeries. Knowing the refined major vasculatures is important for surgeons to plan resection into liver segments for tumor treatment, and dissection into right and left lobes to assess accurate liver volume in determining donor suitability for liver transplantation. Therefore, an automated hepatic vessel segmentation scheme followed by vasculature refinement is recommended for planning tumor resections and living donor liver transplants. In addition, these vessel extraction and refinement methods combined with liver region segmentation techniques can also be applicable to extract tree-like organ structures such as carotid artery, renal artery, coronary artery, and airway paths from various medical imaging modalities.