3D Liver Tumor Segmentation in CT Images Using Improved Fuzzy C-Means and Graph Cuts

Three-dimensional (3D) liver tumor segmentation from Computed Tomography (CT) images is a prerequisite for computer-aided diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of liver cancer. Despite many years of research, 3D liver tumor segmentation remains a challenging task. In this paper, an efficient semiautomatic method was proposed for liver tumor segmentation in CT volumes based on improved fuzzy C-means (FCM) and graph cuts. With a single seed point, the tumor volume of interest (VOI) was extracted using confidence connected region growing algorithm to reduce computational cost. Then, initial foreground/background regions were labeled automatically, and a kernelized FCM with spatial information was incorporated in graph cuts segmentation to increase segmentation accuracy. The proposed method was evaluated on the public clinical dataset (3Dircadb), which included 15 CT volumes consisting of various sizes of liver tumors. We achieved an average volumetric overlap error (VOE) of 29.04% and Dice similarity coefficient (DICE) of 0.83, with an average processing time of 45 s per tumor. The experimental results showed that the proposed method was accurate for 3D liver tumor segmentation with a reduction of processing time.