A Method for Quickly and Exactly Extracting Hepatic Vessel

Abstract

It is of vital importance that providing detailed and accurate information about hepatic vessel for liver surgery planning, such as pre-operative planning of living donor liver transplantation (LDLT). Due to the different blood flow rate of intra-hepatic vascular systems and the restrictions of CT scan, it is common that hepatic vessels are filled with contrast medium during the scan and in high intensity in the hepatic venous phase images. As a result, the hepatic vessel segmentation result obtained from the hepatic venous phase images is always contaminated which makes accurate hepatic vessel modeling difficult. In this paper, we proposed a method for quick and accurate hepatic vessel extraction. Firstly, the Hessian method is used to enhance the vessel areas. Then, a region growing vessel segmentation algorithm can obtain the hepatic vessel. Experiments show that the proposed method can segment the liver vessels accurately with a certain practicability and operability.