Comparative evaluation of two segmentation algorithms: Application on liver segmentation of CT abdomen images

Abstract

Liver segmentation plays a crucial role mainly in tumor segmentation, 3D volume reconstruction and treatment planning of liver disease. In the present work, a comparative evaluation of two segmentation methods named as active contour and level set is presented. Comparative evaluation of both methods has been done individually by applying on Computed Tomography (CT) abdomen images. Comparative study is done by following steps (i) Preprocessing using morphological functions (ii) Segmentation of liver using active contour/level set algorithms (iii) 3-Dimensional volume reconstruction. Results of applied liver segmentation algorithms are compared with manually performed delineations by radiologist. Volume overlapping of above methods is assessed using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) which gives mean DSC of 93.52%±.62 and 89.48%±.76 in case of active contour and level set method respectively. Finally it can be demonstrated that active contour is superior to level set in terms of accuracy, processing time and 3D volume reconstruction.