A semi-automatic and an automatic segmentation algorithm to remove the internal organs from live pig CT images

Abstract

Removal of internal organs such as lungs, liver, and kidneys is a key step required to compute the lean meat percentage from Computed Tomography (CT) scans of live animals. In this paper, we propose two segmentation techniques to remove these organs focusing on pigs. The first method is semi-automatic, and it starts with the first CT slice and a manually defined mask with internal organs. Then, it applies a four-step iterative process that computes the masks of the next CT slices by using the information of the previous one. To find the best boundary it uses a Dynamic Programming-based approach. At each iteration the user can check the correctness of the new computed mask. The second method is fully automatic, and segments each slice individually by using distance maps and morphological operators, such as dilation. It is composed of three main steps which detect the pig's torso, pre-classify the voxels in different tissues, and segment the internal organs using the information of such classification. Although it has some parameters, user interaction is not required to obtain the results. The proposed approaches have been tested on CT data sets from 9 pigs, and compared with a manual segmentation. To evaluate the results, the precision, recall, and F-score measures have been used. From our test, we can observe that the performance of both methods is very high according to their average F-score. We also analyse how the accuracy of the results in the semi-automatic approach increases when more user interaction is applied. For the automatic approach, we evaluate the dependence of the results on the algorithm's parameters. If robustness is enough, and high accuracy is not required, the automatic algorithm can be used to segment a whole pig in less than 50 s. However, if the user wants to control the level of accuracy, the semi-automatic algorithm is preferred. Both methods are useful to reduce the time needed to segment the internal organs of a pig from hours (manual segmentation) to minutes or seconds