Multi-organ segmentation with missing organs in abdominal CT images

Abstract

Currently, multi-organ segmentation (MOS) in abdominal CT can fail to handle clinical patient population with missing organs due to surgical resection. In order to enable the state-of-the-art MOS for these clinically important cases, we propose 1) automatic missing organ detection (MOD) by testing abnormality of post-surgical organ motion and organ-specific intensity homogeneity, and 2) atlas-based MOS of 10 abdominal organs that handles missing organs automatically. The proposed methods are validated with 44 abdominal CT scans including 9 diseased cases with surgical organ resections, resulting in 93.3% accuracy for MOD and improved overall segmentation accuracy by the proposed MOS method when tested on difficult diseased cases.