title: Automated method for detection and segmentation of liver metastatic lesions in follow-up CT examinations.
abstract: This paper presents a fully automated method for detection and segmentation of liver metastases in serial computed tomography (CT) examinations. Our method uses a given two-dimensional baseline segmentation mask for identifying the lesion location in the follow-up CT and locating surrounding tissues, using nonrigid image registration and template matching, in order to reduce the search area for segmentation. Adaptive region growing and mean-shift clustering are used to obtain the lesion segmentation. Our database contains 127 cases from the CT abdomen unit at Sheba Medical Center. Development of the methodology was conducted using 22 of the cases, and testing was conducted on the remaining 105 cases. Results show that 94 of the 105 lesions were detected, for an overall matching rate of 90% making the correct RECIST 1.1 assessment in 88% of the cases. The average Dice index was [Formula: see text], the average sensitivity was [Formula: see text], and the positive predictive value was [Formula: see text]. In 92% of the rated cases, the results were classified by the radiologists as acceptable or better. The segmentation performance, matching rate, and RECIST assessment results hence appear promising.
authors.affiliation: Tel Aviv University , Faculty of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Image Processing Laboratory, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
authors.forename: Avi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ben-Cohen
authors.affiliation: Sheba Medical Center , Diagnostic Imaging Department, Abdominal Imaging Unit, Tel Hashomer 52621, Israel.
authors.forename: Eyal
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Klang
authors.affiliation: Tel Aviv University , Faculty of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Image Processing Laboratory, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
authors.forename: Idit
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Diamant
authors.affiliation: Sheba Medical Center , Diagnostic Imaging Department, Abdominal Imaging Unit, Tel Hashomer 52621, Israel.
authors.forename: Noa
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Rozendorn
authors.affiliation: Sheba Medical Center , Diagnostic Imaging Department, Abdominal Imaging Unit, Tel Hashomer 52621, Israel.
authors.forename: Michal Marianne
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Amitai
authors.affiliation: Tel Aviv University , Faculty of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Image Processing Laboratory, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel.
authors.forename: Hayit
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Greenspan
keywords: computed tomography sequential image analysis; detection; follow-up examination; liver metastasis; segmentation