Quantitative CT for Volumetric Analysis of Medical Images: Initial Results for Liver Tumors

摘要

Quantitative CT for volumetric analysis of medical images is increasingly being proposed for monitoring patient response during chemotherapy trials. An integrated MATLAB GUI has been developed for an oncology trial at Georgetown University Hospital. This GUI allows for the calculation and visualization of the volume of a lesion. The GUI provides an estimate of the volume of the tumor using a semi-automatic segmentation technique. This software package features a fixed parameter adaptive filter from the ITK toolkit and a tumor segmentation algorithm to reduce inter-user variability and to facilitate rapid volume measurements. The system also displays a 3D rendering of the segmented tumor, allowing the end user to have not only a quantitative measure of the tumor volume, but a qualitative view as well. As an initial validation test, several clinical cases were hand-segmented, and then compared against the results from the tool, showing good agreement.