• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.5
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• pp.341-352
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• 2022

Medical image segmentation is the most important task in radiation therapy. Especially, when segmenting medical images, the liver is one of the most difficult organs to segment because it has various shapes and is close to other organs. Therefore, automatic segmentation of the liver in computed tomography (CT) images is a difficult task. Since tumors also have low contrast in surrounding tissues, and the shape, location, size, and number of tumors vary from patient to patient, accurate tumor segmentation takes a long time. In this study, we propose a method algorithm for automatically segmenting the liver and tumor for this purpose. As an advantage of setting the boundaries of the tumor, the liver and tumor were automatically segmented from the CT image using the 2D CoordConv DeepLab V3+ model using the CoordConv layer. For tumors, only cropped liver images were used to improve accuracy. Additionally, to increase the segmentation accuracy, augmentation, preprocess, loss function, and hyperparameter were used to find optimal values. We compared the CoordConv DeepLab v3+ model using the CoordConv layer and the DeepLab V3+ model without the CoordConv layer to determine whether they affected the segmentation accuracy. The data sets used included 131 hepatic tumor segmentation (LiTS) challenge data sets (100 train sets, 16 validation sets, and 15 test sets). Additional learned data were tested using 15 clinical data from Seoul St. Mary's Hospital. The evaluation was compared with the study results learned with a two-dimensional deep learning-based model. Dice values without the CoordConv layer achieved 0.965 ± 0.01 for liver segmentation and 0.925 ± 0.04 for tumor segmentation using the LiTS data set. Results from the clinical data set achieved 0.927 ± 0.02 for liver division and 0.903 ± 0.05 for tumor division. The dice values using the CoordConv layer achieved 0.989 ± 0.02 for liver segmentation and 0.937 ± 0.07 for tumor segmentation using the LiTS data set. Results from the clinical data set achieved 0.944 ± 0.02 for liver division and 0.916 ± 0.18 for tumor division. The use of CoordConv layers improves the segmentation accuracy. The highest of the most recently published values were 0.960 and 0.749 for liver and tumor division, respectively. However, better performance was achieved with 0.989 and 0.937 results for liver and tumor, which would have been used with the algorithm proposed in this study. The algorithm proposed in this study can play a useful role in treatment planning by improving contouring accuracy and reducing time when segmentation evaluation of liver and tumor is performed. And accurate identification of liver anatomy in medical imaging applications, such as surgical planning, as well as radiotherapy, which can leverage the findings of this study, can help clinical evaluation of the risks and benefits of liver intervention.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.16-37
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• 2022

Accurate liver segment segmentation based on radiological images is indispensable for the preoperative analysis of liver tumor resection surgery. However, most of the existing segmentation methods are not feasible to be used directly for this task due to the challenge of exact edge prediction with some tiny and slender vessels as its clinical segmentation criterion. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep learning based segmentation model, called Boundary-Aware Dual Attention Liver Segment Segmentation Model (BADA). This model can improve the segmentation accuracy of liver segments with enhancing the edges including the vessels serving as segment boundaries. In our model, the dual gated attention is proposed, which composes of a spatial attention module and a semantic attention module. The spatial attention module enhances the weights of key edge regions by concerning about the salient intensity changes, while the semantic attention amplifies the contribution of filters that can extract more discriminative feature information by weighting the significant convolution channels. Simultaneously, we build a dataset of liver segments including 59 clinic cases with dynamically contrast enhanced MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of portal vein stage, which annotated by several professional radiologists. Comparing with several state-of-the-art methods and baseline segmentation methods, we achieve the best results on this clinic liver segment segmentation dataset, where Mean Dice, Mean Sensitivity and Mean Positive Predicted Value reach 89.01%, 87.71% and 90.67%, respectively.

• Journal of International Society for Simulation Surgery
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.37-40
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• 2014

Purpose For living donor liver transplantation, liver segmentation is difficult due to the variability of its shape across patients and similarity of the density of neighbor organs such as heart, stomach, kidney, and spleen. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation of the liver using multi-planar anatomy and deformable surface model in portal phase of abdominal contrast-enhanced CT images. Method Our method is composed of four main steps. First, the optimal liver volume is extracted by positional information of pelvis and rib and by separating lungs and heart from CT images. Second, anisotropic diffusing filtering and adaptive thresholding are used to segment the initial liver volume. Third, morphological opening and connected component labeling are applied to multiple planes for removing neighbor organs. Finally, deformable surface model and probability summation map are performed to refine a posterior liver surface and missing left robe in previous step. Results All experimental datasets were acquired on ten living donors using a SIEMENS CT system. Each image had a matrix size of $512{\times}512$ pixels with in-plane resolutions ranging from 0.54 to 0.70 mm. The slice spacing was 2.0 mm and the number of images per scan ranged from 136 to 229. For accuracy evaluation, the average symmetric surface distance (ASD) and the volume overlap error (VE) between automatic segmentation and manual segmentation by two radiologists are calculated. The ASD was $0.26{\pm}0.12mm$ for manual1 versus automatic and $0.24{\pm}0.09mm$ for manual2 versus automatic while that of inter-radiologists was $0.23{\pm}0.05mm$. The VE was $0.86{\pm}0.45%$ for manual1 versus automatic and $0.73{\pm}0.33%$ for manaual2 versus automatic while that of inter-radiologist was $0.76{\pm}0.21%$. Conclusion Our method can be used for the liver volumetry for the pre-surgery planning of living donor liver transplantation.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.70-76
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• 2004

The most important work for early detection of liver cancer and decision of its characteristic and location is good segmentation of a liver region from other abdominal organs. This paper proposes a fully automatic liver segmentation algorithm based on the abdominal morphology characteristic as an easy and efficient method. Multi-modal threshold as pre-processing is peformed and a spine is segmented for finding morphological coordinates of an abdomen. Then the liver region is extracted using C-class maximum a posteriori (MAP) decision and morphological filtering. In order to estimate results of the automatic segmented liver region, area error rate (AER) and correlation coefficients of rotational binary region projection matching (RBRPM) are utilized. Experimental results showed automatic liver segmentation obtained by the proposed algorithm provided strong similarity to manual liver segmentation.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.103-111
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• 2020

Liver cancer is the most fatal cancer that occurs worldwide. In order to diagnose liver cancer, the patient's physical condition was checked by using a CT technique using radiation. Segmentation was needed to diagnose the liver on the patient's abdominal CT scan, which the radiologists had to do manually, which caused tremendous time and human mistakes. In order to automate, researchers attempted segmentation using image segmentation algorithms in computer vision field, but it was still time-consuming because of the interactive based and the setting value. To reduce time and to get more accurate segmentation, researchers have begun to attempt to segment the liver in CT images using CNNs, which show significant performance in various computer vision fields. The pixel value, or numerical value, of the CT image is called the Hounsfield Unit (HU) value, which is a relative representation of the transmittance of radiation, and usually ranges from about -2000 to 2000. In general, deep learning researchers reduce or limit this range and use it for training to remove noise and focus on the target organ. Here, we observed that the range of HU values was limited in many studies but different in various liver segmentation studies, and assumed that performance could vary depending on the HU range. In this paper, we propose the possibility of considering HU value range as a hyper parameter. U-Net and ResUNet were used to compare and experiment with different HU range limit preprocessing of CHAOS dataset under limited conditions. As a result, it was confirmed that the results are different depending on the HU range. This proves that the range limiting the HU value itself can be a hyper parameter, which means that there are HU ranges that can provide optimal performance for various models.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.9 no.12
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• pp.1588-1595
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• 2006

In this paper, we proposed a liver extracting procedure for computer aided liver diagnosis system. Extraction of liver region in an abdominal CT image is difficult due to interferences of other organs. For this reason, liver region is extracted in a region of interest(ROI). ROI is selected by the window which can measure the distribution of Hounsfield Unit(HU) value of liver region in an abdominal CT image. The distribution is measured by an existential probability of HU value of lever region in the window. If the probability of any window is over 50%, the center point of the window would be assigned to ROI. Actually, liver region is not clearly discerned from the adjacent organs like muscle, spleen, and pancreas in an abdominal CT image. Liver region is extracted by the watershed segmentation algorithm which is effective in this situation. Because it is very sensitive to the slight valiance of contrast, it generally produces over segmentation regions. Therefore these regions are required to merge into the significant regions for optimal segmentation. Finally, a liver region can be selected and extracted by prier information based on anatomic information.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.59-70
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• 2020

This paper presents a fully automatic tool to recognize the liver region from CT images based on a deep learning model, namely Multiple Filter U-net, MFUnet. The advantages of both U-net and Multiple Filters were utilized to construct an autoencoder model, called MFUnet for segmenting the liver region from computed tomograph. The MFUnet architecture includes the autoencoding model which is used for regenerating the liver region, the backbone model for extracting features which is trained on ImageNet, and the predicting model used for liver segmentation. The LiTS dataset and Chaos dataset were used for the evaluation of our research. This result shows that the integration of Multiple Filter to U-net improves the performance of liver segmentation and it opens up many research directions in medical imaging processing field.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.757-768
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• 2022

In this paper, we proposed a system that visualizes a hologram device in 3D by utilizing the CT image segmentation function based on artificial intelligence deep learning. The input axial CT medical image is converted into Sagittal and Coronal, and the input image and the converted image are divided into 3D volumes using ResUNet, a deep learning model. In addition, the volume is created by segmenting the tumor region in the segmented liver image. Each result is integrated into one 3D volume, displayed in a medical image viewer, and converted into a video. When the converted video is transmitted to the hologram device and output from the device, a 3D image with a sense of space can be checked. As for the performance of the deep learning model, in Axial, the basic input image, DSC showed 95.0% performance in liver region segmentation and 67.5% in liver tumor region segmentation. If the system is applied to a real-world care environment, additional physical contact is not required, making it safer for patients to explain changes before and after surgery more easily. In addition, it will provide medical staff with information on liver and liver tumors necessary for treatment or surgery in a three-dimensional manner, and help patients manage them after surgery by comparing and observing the liver before and after liver resection.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.153-156
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• 2003

In this paper, we propose a new scheme for automatic segmentation of the liver in CT images. The proposed scheme is carried out on region of interest(ROI) blocks that include regions of the liver with high probabilities. The ROI approach saves unnecessary computational loss in finding the accurate boundary of the liver. The proposed method utilizes the composition of multi-size morphological filters with a prior knowledge, such as the general location or the approximate intensity of the liver to detect the initial boundary of the liver. Then, we make the gradient image with the weight of the initial liver boundary and segment the liver legion by using an immersion-based waters hed algorithm in the gradient image. finally, the refining process is carried out to acquire a more accurate liver region.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.1698-1705
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a fast liver segmentation method from magnetic resonance(MR) images. Our method efficiently divides a MR image into a set of discrete objects, and boundaries based on the normalized gradient magnitude information. Then, the objects belonging to the liver are detected by using 2D seeded region growing with seed points, which are extracted from the segmented liver region of the slice immediately above or below the current slice. Finally, rolling ball algorithm, and connected component analysis minimizes false positive error near the liver boundaries. Our method was validated by twenty data sets and the results were compared with the manually segmented result. The average volumetric overlap error was 5.2%, and average absolute volumetric measurement error was 1.9%. The average processing time for segmenting one data set was about three seconds. Our method could be used for computer-aided liver diagnosis, which requires a fast and accurate segmentation of liver.