Performance benchmarking of liver CT image segmentation and volume estimation

In recent years more and more computer aided diagnosis (CAD) systems are being used routinely in hospitals. Imagebased knowledge discovery plays important roles in many CAD applications, which have great potential to be integrated into the next-generation picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). Robust medical image segmentation tools are essentials for such discovery in many CAD applications. In this paper we present a platform with necessary tools for performance benchmarking for algorithms of liver segmentation and volume estimation used for liver transplantation planning. It includes an abdominal computer tomography (CT) image database (DB), annotation tools, a ground truth DB, and performance measure protocols. The proposed architecture is generic and can be used for other organs and imaging modalities. In the current study, approximately 70 sets of abdominal CT images with normal livers have been collected and a user-friendly annotation tool is developed to generate ground truth data for a variety of organs, including 2D contours of liver, two kidneys, spleen, aorta and spinal canal. Abdominal organ segmentation algorithms using 2D atlases and 3D probabilistic atlases can be evaluated on the platform. Preliminary benchmark results from the liver segmentation algorithms which make use of statistical knowledge extracted from the abdominal CT image DB are also reported. We target to increase the CT scans to about 300 sets in the near future and plan to make the DBs built available to medical imaging research community for performance benchmarking of liver segmentation algorithms.