Automated liver lesion detection in CT images based on multi-level geometric features.

Purpose: Due to the increasing number of liver cancer cases in clinical practice, there is a significant need for efficient tools for computer-assisted liver lesion analysis. A wide range of clinical applications, such as lesion characterization, quantification and follow-up, can be facilitated by automated liver lesion detection. Liver lesions vary significantly in size, shape, density and heterogeneity, which make them difficult to detect automatically. The goal of this work was to develop a method that can detect all types of liver lesions with high sensitivity and low false positive rate within a short run time.

Methods: The proposed method identifies abnormal regions in liver CT images based on their intensity using a multi-level segmentation approach. The abnormal regions are analyzed from the inside-out using basic geometric features (such as asymmetry, compactness or volume). Using this multi-level shape characterization, the abnormal regions are classified into lesions and other region types (including vessel, liver boundary). The proposed analysis also allows defining the contour of each finding. The method was trained on a set of 55 cases involving 120 lesions and evaluated on a set of 30 images involving 59 (various types of) lesions, which were manually contoured by a physician.

Results: The proposed algorithm demonstrated a high detection rate (92 %) at a low (1.7) false positive per case (precision 51 %), when the method was started from a manually contoured liver. The same level of false positive per case (1.6) and precision (51 %) was achieved at a somewhat lower detection rate (85 %), when the volume of interest was defined by a fully automated liver segmentation.

Conclusions: The proposed method can efficiently detect liver lesions irrespective of their size, shape, density and heterogeneity within half a minute. According to the evaluation, its accuracy is competitive with the actual state-of-the-art approaches, and the contour of the detected findings is acceptable in most of the cases. Future work shall focus on more precise lesion contouring so that the proposed method can be a solid basis for fully automated liver tumour burden estimation.