In abdominal surgery, understanding blood vessel structure is important because abdominal blood vessels have large individual differences among patients. Computers must be used to support surgeons and their understanding of blood vessel structures. This paper presents a method of automated anatomical labeling of abdominal veins. A thinning process is applied to the abdominal vein regions extracted from a CT volume. The result of the process is expressed as a tree structure. Since portal veins have a characteristic shape and position in the portal system, we applied rule-based anatomical labeling to them. The names of other veins are assigned by classifiers trained by a machine learning technique, where several likelihood functions are constructed for each vessel name. Their weighted sum is used as the likelihood of the vessel name. The names of the branches in the tree structure are labeled by searching for the branch whose likelihood of an anatomical name is maximum and assigning the anatomical name to the branch. In an experiment using 50 cases of abdominal CT volumes, the recall rate, the precision rate, and the F-measure were 87.5, 93.1, and 90.2%, respectively.

Date Published: 13 March 2013
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8669, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing, 86691Y (13 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2006745

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8669:
Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing
Sebastien Ourselin; David R. Haynor, Editor(s)