Combining Arterial and Venous CT Scans in a Multi-Encoder Network for Improved Hepatic Vessel Segmentation

The segmentation of hepatic vessel systems is important for many applications treating malignant liver disease such as selective internal radiation therapy. To enhance the different vessel systems, contrast agent is injected intravenously and CT scans are obtained at different time points and phases of contrast agent perfusion in liver vessels and parenchyma. We demonstrate that using the registered arterial phase as additional input for training an aU-Net for portal vein (PV) and hepatic vein (HV) segmentation increases the centerline Dice. However, using the registered venous phase for hepatic artery (HA) segmentation does not improve segmentation performance.