Auto Kidney Location And Segmentation Without Using Contrast Medium On Abdominal CT Images

Image segmentation is one of the most important issues in computer aided medical imaging. Medical images include Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Ultrasonography (US) et al. It is used in the analysis and diagnosis of numerous applications such as the study of anatomical structure, location of pathology, treatment planning, and computer-integrated surgery. There are two main reasons for the use of computer aided segmentation: one is to improve upon the conventional user-guided segmentation, and the other one is to acquire segmentation prior to visualization or quantification for the analysis of medical images. In recent years, many computer-aided diagnostic systems have been developed to assist in the making of precise and objective diagnoses for lung cancer, liver tumor, and breast diseases. However, relatively little research has been focused on kidney segmentation.In this paper, an effective region grow-based approach for computer-aided kidney segmentation of abdominal CT images with anatomic structure consideration is presented. This automatic segmentation system is expected to assist physicians in both clinical diagnosis and educational training.The proposed method is a coarse to fine segmentation approach divided into two stages. First, the candidate kidney region is extracted according to the statistical geometric location of kidney within the abdomen. This approach is applicable to images of different sizes by using the relative distance of the kidney region to the spine. The...