Vessel segmentation for ablation treatment planning and simulation.

In this paper, a novel segmentation method for liver vasculature is presented, intended for numerical simulation of radio frequency ablation (RFA). The developed method is a semiautomatic hybrid based on multi-scale vessel enhancement combined with ridge-oriented region growing and skeleton-based postprocessing. In addition, an interactive tool for segmentation refinement was developed. Four instances of three-phase contrast enhanced computed tomography (CT) images of porcine liver were used in the evaluation. The results showed improved accuracy over common approaches and illustrated the method's suitability for simulation purposes.