Computerized planning of liver surgery—an overview

Abstract

Liver surgery is a field in which computer-based operation planning has an enormous impact on the selection of therapeutic strategy. Based on pre-operative analysis of image data, liver operation planning provides a individual impression of tumor location, the exact structure of the vascular system and an identification of liver segments and sub-segments. In this paper we present an operation planning system that is based on an object-oriented framework. This framework offers extensive automation of the integration process for software modules developed for medical software systems. The operation planning system can calculate the operation proposal results using two different approaches. The first method is based on the Couinaud's classification system, which uses the main stems of the portal and venous trees. The second approach is a portal vein based method. These two approaches were compared using 23 liver CT scans. The volumetric data for individual segments demonstrates differences between the two segment classification methods.