title: Automatic labeling of portal and hepatic veins from MR images prior to liver transplantation.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Living donated liver transplantation is an important task since a person (healthy donor) donates some part of her/his liver to a person in this surgery operation. The success of this operation mainly depends on the sufficiency of vessels and volume of the liver. Accurate labeling of portal and hepatic veins of donors reduces the incidence of complications during and after transplantation. Therefore, prior to the hepatic surgery, automatic analysis and labeling of vasculature structures in the liver are vital to see whether liver is suitable or not for transplantation. However, automatic labeling of veins in the liver is challenging because of partial volume effects, noise and image resolution, which causes wrong connections between vessels. The goal of this paper is to propose an automatic labeling approach for vessels.
  
  
  METHODS
  The proposed automated labeling method is based on gray-level values in the MR images and anatomical information. In this work, detection and segmentation of vascular structures in the liver is performed automatically with clustering-based segmentation and refinement stages.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The accuracy of the automatic labeling approach is 85 %. Required processing time for the proposed method (average 6 s) is shorter than manual approach (average 295 s) for labeling of hepatic and portal veins from segmented vessels.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed approach is efficient in terms of both computational cost and accuracy of labeling and segmentation of hepatic and portal veins.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Engineering, Akdeniz University, 07058, Antalya, Turkey. evgin@akdeniz.edu.tr.
authors.forename: Evgin
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2329-4107
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Goceri
mesh_terms: D006503:Hepatic Veins / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000601:surgery; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008099:Liver / Q000098:blood supply / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D016031:Liver Transplantation; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D011169:Portal Vein / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000601:surgery; D014019:Tissue Donors
keywords: Hepatic vein; MR images; Portal vein; Vessel labeling; Vessel segmentation