Fully automatic segmentations of liver and hepatic tumors from 3-D computed tomography abdominal images: comparative evaluation of two automatic methods

An adaptive initialization method was developed to produce fully automatic processing frameworks based on graph-cut and gradient flow active contour algorithms. This method was applied to abdominal Computed Tomography (CT) images for segmentation of liver tissue and hepatic tumours. 25 anonymized datasets were randomly collected from several radiology centres without specific request on acquisition parameter settings nor patient clinical situation as inclusion criteria. Resulting automatic segmentations of liver tissue and tumours were compared to their reference standard delineations manually performed by a specialist. Segmentation accuracy has been assessed through the following evaluation framework: dice similarity coefficient (DSC), false negative ratio (FNR), false positive ratio (FPR) and processing time. Regarding liver surfaces, graph-cuts achieved a DSC of 95.49% (FPR=2.35% and FNR=5.10%), while active contours reached a DSC of 96.17% (FPR=3.35% and FNR=3.87%). The analyzed datasets presented 52 tumours: graph-cut algorithm detected 48 tumours with a DSC of 88.65%, while active contour algorithm detected only 44 tumours with a DSC of 87.10%. In addition, in terms of time performances, less time was requested for graph-cut algorithm with respect to active contour one. The implemented initialization method allows fully automatic segmentation leading to superior overall performances of graph-cut algorithm in terms of accuracy and processing time. The initialisation method here presented resulted suitable and reliable for two different segmentation techniques and could be further extended.