Probabilistic Atlas Based Region Growing Method for Contrast Enhanced MR Imaging

AutomaticsegmentationofliverregionsfromabdominalMRimagesisoneofthechallengesincom- puter aided diagnosis (CAD) system. Probabilistic Atlas (PA) based methods are considered e ffi cient and robust in liver segmentation because the knowledge of distribution of object is incorporated in segmenting procedure. However, the estimation of the parameters of PA impacts the precise of segment results directly. In this paper, we proposed a novel method using region growing method with PA. We carried out experiments by the proposed method on 7 cases of abdominal contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance (MR) Images. The experimental results show that the performance of the method using region growing with probabilistic atlas is higher than that without probabilistic atlas.