Portal vein registration for the follow-up of hepatic tumours

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an original method which permits a follow-up of intra-patient evolution of tumours in the liver by using a registration of the portal vascular system. First, several methods to segment the liver data structures (liver, vascular systems and tumours) on computed tomography scans are presented. Secondly, the skeleton of the vessels is computed and transformed into a graph representation. Then, the intra-patient graph registration is computed to determine an approximation of liver deformation. Finally, the deformation permits to match tumours to diagnose their evolution. For each step, we present the methods we used and their results on CT-scan images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.