Preliminary Study for Automated Recognition of Anatomical Structure from Torso CT images

The anatomical human structure recognition is very important and necessary during the development of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system. In this paper, we propose an image processing scheme that can recognize the general structure of human torso by identifying the human torso region from CT images automatically and separating it into 7 parts: skin, subcutaneous fat, muscle, bone, diaphragm, thoracic cavity and abdominal cavity based on CT number distribution and spatial relations between different organ and tissue regions. We applied this scheme to 313 patient cases of torso CT images and confirmed its usefulness from the preliminary experiment