Automatic Detection of Multi Organs on the CT Images Using the Ribs Information and a Level Set Method

Recently, various imaging equipment such as high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) have been intoroduced into medical fields. Accordingly, many related image processing techniques are proposed into medical fields for extraction of abnormal area. Also, segmentation is one of the most important problems for analyzing the abnormalities and some segmentation techinques have been developed for automatic extraction of region of interest (ROI) before analyzing the abnomalities in the medical image processing field. It is, however, there are still no fully automatic segmantation methods that are generally applicable to ROI based on CT image set. In this paper, we present a technique for automatic extraction of the multi organs on the multi detector row computed tomography (MDCT) images employing the ribs information which is obtained by anatomical information and a level set method. We apply our proposed technique to three image sets and satisfactory segmentation results are achieved.