A generic, robust and fully-automatic workflow for 3D CT liver segmentation

Abstract : Liver segmentation in 3D CT images is a fundamental step for surgery planning and follow-up. Robustness, automation and speed are required to fulll this task efficiently. We propose a fully-automatic workflow for liver segmentation built on state-of-the-art algorithmic components to meet these requirements. The liver is first localized using regression forests. A liver probability map is computed, followed by a global-to-local segmentation strategy using a template deformation framework. We evaluate our method on the SLIVER07 reference database and confirm its state-of-the-art results on a large, varied database of 268 CT volumes. This extensive validation demonstrates the robustness of our approach to variable fields of view, liver contrast, shape and pathologies. Our framework is an attractive tradeoff between robustness, accuracy (mean distance to ground truth of 1.7mm) and computational speed (46s). We also emphasize the genericity and relative simplicity of our framework, which requires very limited liver-specic tuning.