Analysis of CT Images of Liver for Surgical Planning

We developed a Computer Assisted Surgery system which prepared a virtual environment for a physician to interact with the liver and decide on the therapy planning. It was composed of three modules: liver segmentation, vessel extraction, and simulator. We proposed a semi-automatic method to segment the liver. Hepatic veins, portal veins, and hepatic arteries were extracted from multi-phase CT datasets. The simulator visualized the segmented objects and provided for a physician a virtual scalpel to cut the liver. Initially, a transparent view of the liver was shown to the physician that revealed the location of the vascular structures. During the surgery, a toggling option made it possible to switch between a transparent and an opaque view. The width, height, and depth of the cut could be changed by user interaction. The proposed system is a framework which can later be extended to a complete system for analysis of hepatic diseases and therapy planning.