In this paper, we propose a new active contour algorithm, i.e. hierarchical contextual active contour (HCAC), and apply it to automatic liver segmentation from three-dimensional CT (3D-CT) images. HCAC is a learning-based method and can be divided into two stages. At the first stage, i.e. the training stage, given a set of abdominal 3D-CT training images and the corresponding manual liver labels, we tried to establish a mapping between automatic segmentations (in each round) and manual reference segmentations via context features, and obtained a series of self-correcting classifiers. At the second stage, i.e. the segmentation stage, we firstly used the basic active contour to segment the image and subsequently used the contextual active contour (CAC) iteratively, which combines the image information and the current shape model, to improve the segmentation result. The current shape model is produced by the corresponding self-correcting classifier (the input is the previous automatic segmentation result). The proposed method was evaluated on the datasets of MICCAI 2007 liver segmentation challenge. The experimental results showed that we would get more and more accurate segmentation results by the iterative steps and the satisfied results would be obtained after about six rounds of iterations.
In view of the problems of more artificial interventions and segmentation defects in existing two-dimensional segmentation methods and abnormal liver segmentation errors in three-dimensional segmentation methods, this paper presents a semi-automatic liver organ segmentation method based on the image sequence context. The method takes advantage of the existing similarity between the image sequence contexts of the prior knowledge of liver organs, and combines region growing and level set method to carry out semi-automatic segmentation of livers, along with the aid of a small amount of manual intervention to deal with liver mutation situations. The experiment results showed that the liver segmentation algorithm presented in this paper had a high precision, and a good segmentation effect on livers which have greater variability, and can meet clinical application demands quite well.