Interactive segmentation of vascular structures in ct images for liver surgery planning

Vasculature analysis based on CT images is indispensable in liver surgical planning and diagnosis of liver disease. We propose a novel framework and an efficient workflow with minimal user interaction to analyze liver vasculature in multi- phase CT images. To ensure segmentation quality and efficiency, a set of semi-automatic algorithms are applied to initially segment different vascular structures at different phases. A fully automatic vessel separation procedure runs parallel to separately connected hepatic and portal veins. In addition, an interactive editing method is integrated into the framework to refine the segmentation of each individual structure. Quantitative evaluations of segmented vessels conducted for 60 test data sets are demonstrated.