Improved Automatic Liver Segmentation of a Contrast Enhanced CT Image

This paper presents an improved automatic liver segmentation method using a left partial histogram threshold (LPHT) algorithm. The LPHT algorithm removes other neighboring abdominal organs regardless of pixel variation of contrast enhanced computed tomography (CE-CT) images. After histogram transformation, adaptive multi-modal threshold is used to find the range of gray-level values of the liver structure. The LPHT algorithm is performed to removing other neighboring organs. Then, binary morphological filtering is processed to remove unnecessary objects and smooth the boundary. 48 CE-CT slices of twelve patients were selected to test the proposed automatic liver segmentation. As evaluation methods, normalized average area and area error rate were used. The results of experiments show similar performance between the proposed algorithm and the manual method by a medical doctor.