Intelligent boundary extraction for area and volume measurement : Using LiveWire for 2D and 3D contour extraction in medical imaging

Abstract: This thesis tries to answer if a semi-automatic tool can speed up the process of segmenting tumors to find the area of a slice in the tumor or the volume of the entire tumor. A few different 2D semi-automatic tools were considered. The final choice was to implement live-wire. The implemented live-wire was evaluated and improved upon with hands-on testing from developers. Two methods were found for extending live-wire to 3D bodies. The first method was to interpolate the seed points and create new contours using the new seed points. The second method was to let the user segment contours in two orthogonal projections. The intersections between those contours and planes in the third orthogonal projection were then used to create automatic contours in this third projection. Both tools were implemented and evaluated. The evaluation compared the two tools to manual segmentation on two cases posing different difficulties. Time-on-task and accuracy were measured during the evaluation. The evaluation revealed that the semi-automatic tools could indeed save the user time while maintaining acceptable (80%) accuracy. The significance of all results were analyzed using two-tailed t-tests.