Analysis of patient images is highly desired for simulating and planning the laser-induced thermotherapy (LITT) to study the cooling effect of big vessels around tumors during the procedure. In this paper, we present an image processing solution for simulating and planning LITT on liver cancer using computed tomography angiography (CTA) images. This includes first performing a 3D anisotropic filtering on the data to remove noise. The liver region is then segmented with a level sets based contour tracking method. A 3D level sets based surface evolution driven by boundary statistics is then used to segment the surfaces of vessels and tumors. Then the medial lines of vessels were extracted by a thinning algorithm. Finally the vessel tree is found on the thinning result, by first constructing a shortest path spanning tree by Dijkstra algorithm and then pruning the unnecessary branches. From the segmentation and vessel skeletonization results, important geometric parameters of the vessels and tumors are calculated for simulation and surgery planning. The proposed methods was applied to a patient's image and the result is shown.

Date Published: 17 February 2012
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8316, Medical Imaging 2012: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling, 831638 (17 February 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.911144

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8316:
Medical Imaging 2012: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling
David R. Holmes III; Kenneth H. Wong, Editor(s)