Abstract:

BACKGROUND: The accurate three-dimensional (3D) segmentation of human tissue can improve the accuracy of clinical diagnosis, the traditional gradient watershed segmentation has the over-segmentation problem which makes the 3D segmentation of human tissue hard to implement.
OBJECTIVE: In order to segment human tissue’s 3D structure and reduce the influence of the pseudo-minima points on image segmentation, to propose an interactive 3D segmentation method based on marker-controlled watershed algorithm.
METHODS: The internal and external markers of CT sequence images were extracted, then the gradient images were modified to segment the images. According to the similarity of neighbouring slices, we segmented the 3D structure of human tissue using human-computer interactive method. We first selected a point from the interested area in the first slice. Then we could extract the interested area from the 3D slices by using the overlap relationship of tissues on continuous CT slices.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: The marker-controlled watershed algorithm solves the over-segmentation problem which segmenting the original gradient images meets. The proposed method makes it possible to make the further segmentation. The results suggest that, the segmented result using interactive 3D segmentation based on watershed algorithm can clearly and accurately shows the 3D features of the tissue.