Semi-automated Virtual Unfolded View Generation Method of Stomach from CT Volumes
This work addresses a domain-specific problem for medical imaging, providing a semi-automated tool to assist in stomach diagnosis, but it is incremental as it builds on existing virtual unfolding techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of generating virtual unfolded views of the stomach from CT volumes for diagnostic purposes, achieving good results in 76.1% of cases in experiments with 67 CT volumes.
CT image-based diagnosis of the stomach is developed as a new way of diagnostic method. A virtual unfolded (VU) view is suitable for displaying its wall. In this paper, we propose a semi-automated method for generating VU views of the stomach. Our method requires minimum manual operations. The determination of the unfolding forces and the termination of the unfolding process are automated. The unfolded shape of the stomach is estimated based on its radius. The unfolding forces are determined so that the stomach wall is deformed to the expected shape. The iterative deformation process is terminated if the difference of the shapes between the deformed shape and expected shape is small. Our experiments using 67 CT volumes showed that our proposed method can generate good VU views for 76.1% cases.