Computer oriented image acquisition of the liver: Toward a better numerical model for radiofrequency ablation

Proc. of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Annual Conference., pp. 3755-3758

IEEE

IEEE EMBC

Simulating physiological interventions for planning purposes requires an accurate virtual liver model as
computation input. To best meet the demands the data acquisition
has to be oriented on image processing purposes. We provide a CT imaging protocol which makes it possible to extract much
more vessels with the same segmentation algorithms than when
using them on datasets from the clinical routine.
Medical evaluation of physiological models demand a satistical evaluation in a pre-clinical study, that means in a first step
reproducible results for a large number of subjects. So data acquisition should be as automatic as possible without neglecting
modeling demands. Image quality should be reproducible to
guarantee an ongoing high quality of image processing results.
We evaluate the protocol by comparison of segmentation
results with results achieved on standard datasets from clinical
routine using the same segmentation methods. Results show that
typically up to ten times more vessels can be extracted and the surface accuracy is improved.