Recognition of the Same Tumors of Hepatocellular Carcinoma between CT Images before and after a Targeted Molecular Therapy

Abstract

This paper presents a method for recognizing the same tumors between CT images before and after a therapy for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma. This recognition is necessary for examining the effectiveness of the therapy with a computer-aided diagnosis. In the proposed method, after a contour of the liver region is corrected, 10 feature points are evenly prepared on the liver contour. And then, the distance between each feature point and each tumor area is measured to determine the location of the tumor area in the liver region. To a tumor area in a slice image before the therapy, the closest tumor area in the slice image after the therapy is selected as the same tumor. Both of the slice images are the same turn from the head of each liver. In the experiment, the accuracy of the proposed method was visually evaluated using CT images of 12 cancer patients and 323 couples of tumors were successfully recognized among 325 couples.