3D Visualisation of Tumours and Blood Vessels in Human Liver

Doherty, M., Bordes, N., Hugh, T. and Pailthorpe, B.

One of the treatments of liver cancer is resection or ablation of one or several tumour and of an area of healthy tissue around it. Computed Tomography (CT) scans are generally used to make the diagnostic and to plan the surgery. The objective is to find the number of tumours, their size and the physical and spatial relationship between the tumours and the main blood vessels. The extraction of the essential information from the images is a time-consuming procedure, as the radiologist must trace the contour of the liver manually as well as the tumour and the main vessels. In addition one problem is that blood vessels and liver tissue show similar contrast on the CT scans. In this paper we describe alternative image processing procedures to visualise more effectively the tumour in three dimensions (3D) with respect to the main blood vessels with less human intervention, using OpenDX and MATLAB.

Cite as: Doherty, M., Bordes, N., Hugh, T. and Pailthorpe, B. (2003). 3D Visualisation of Tumours and Blood Vessels in Human Liver. In Proc. Pan-Sydney Area Workshop on Visual Information Processing (VIP2002), Sydney, Australia. CRPIT, 22. Jin, J. S., Eades, P., Feng, D. D. and Yan, H., Eds. ACS. 27.

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