Improvement of procedure for automated extraction of stomach fold regions form abdominal X-ray CT images

摘要

This paper presents improvement of the procedure for automated extraction of stomach fold regions from abdominal X-ray CT images. In the previous procedure, there were following two problems; (1) Increase of extracted false regions as higher sensitivity of the image enhancement filter, and (2) extraction of false fold regions due to miss-extraction of the gastric angle area as a fold region. For the former, the method for discriminatory between true and false fold regions in the extracted candidates is improved. For the latter, a method for extraction of fold regions specialized for the gastric angle area is proposed. From experiments using twelve practical CT images, it was known that the improved procedure can extract many fine fold regions with suppressing the occurrence of false regions, and also can extract some fold regions in the gastric angle area. This can be the first step toward realization of a system for computer- aided 3D diagnosis of stomach by CT.