Research on Liver Segmentation of CT Image Based on Deep Active Contour Model

Liver cancer is one of the liver diseases with a high morbidity and mortality. At present, surgery is still the main treatment method for liver cancer. Therefore, it is particularly important to accurately segment the liver on CT imaging. Deep learning-based algorithms struggle to derive shape priors due to the irregular shape of the liver and blurring organ borders in CT images. We present a two-stage 3D deep active contour model 3DAC based on the V-net and CV models, in which the neural network is guided to learn the global features by regressing the signed distance map. The signed distance function can also be used as an initialization level set function. Then, the active contour model is extended to three dimensions to enable evolution of the overall liver surface. The advantages of the proposed method for liver segmentation were validated on the AbdomenCT-lK dataset. Compared with the DALS method, the Dice coefficient and the Jaccard coefficient are improved by 4.29% and 4.58%, the ASD and 95HD indicators are improved by 5. 96mm and 10. 04mm, which proves the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.