Automated anatomical labeling of abdominal arteries and hepatic portal system extracted from abdominal CT volumes.

This paper proposes a method for automated anatomical labeling of abdominal arteries and a hepatic portal system. In abdominal surgeries, understanding blood vessel structure is critical since it is very complicated. The input of the proposed method is the blood vessel region extracted from the CT volume. The blood vessel region is expressed as a tree structure by applying a thinning process to it and compute the mapping from the branches in the tree structure to the anatomical names. First, several characteristic anatomical names are assigned by rule-based pre-processing. The branches assigned to these names are used as references. The remaining blood vessel names are assigned using a likelihood function trained by a machine-learning technique. Simple rule-based postprocessing can correct several blood vessel names. The output of the proposed method is a tree structure with anatomical names. In an experiment using 50 blood vessel regions manually extracted from abdominal CT volumes, the recall and precision rates of the abdominal arteries were 86.2% and 85.3%, and they were 86.5% and 79.5% for the hepatic portal system.