We present a fully automatic 3D segmentation method forthe liver from contrast-enhanced CT data. It is based on a combinationof a constrained free-form and statistical deformable model. The adap-tation of the model to the image data is performed according to a simplemodel of the typical intensity distribution around the liver boundary andneighboring anatomical structures, considering the potential presence oftumors in the liver. All parameters of the deformation as well as theinitial positioning of the model in the data are estimated automatically.
This work won the 2007 MICCAI 3D Segmentation Challenge in the category “Automatic Liver Segmentation” (see results).