An Improved Expectation-Maximization Algorithm to Detect Liver Image Boundary in CT Scan Images

Abstract

Liver segmentation is a prolific and important area of research that has been deeply studied for the last three decades. Its prominence is increasing in modern Computer-Aided disease Diagnosis (CAD) to deal with a huge amount of images. In this paper, the CT scan image is resized to 256 X 256, and noise is reduced by a median filter, and then local peaks are acquired. The optimal clusters (k) to be formed by Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm are obtained by setting the distance between local peaks and height greater than 5. Formulate k number of clusters using the EM algorithm. Crop random section of liver and obtain all the local peaks greater than average of local peaks. This provides the minimum and maximum threshold values using which a threshold-based segmentation is performed. The anticipated algorithm that is verified on 55 CT scan images offers promising results. The experimental outcomes are compared with the existing cluster-based liver segmentation algorithms.

Keywords:

• Boundary detection
• CT scan
• EM algorithm
• Histogram
• Liver segmentation
• Threshold

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sangeeta K. Siri

Sangeeta K. Siri received a Bachelor of Engineering in 1998 in SDMCET, Dharwad, Karnataka, India. She received her master’s degree in electronics from BMSCE, Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in image processing from VTU, Belagavi, Karnataka, India. She is working as an assistant professor in the Electronics and Communication Department at Sapthagiri College of Engineering. Her area of interest is image processing and pattern recognition.

Pramod Kumar S.

Pramod Kumar S received his BE degree in electronics and communication engineering from VEC Bellay and MTech, in VLSI design and embedded systems from UTL Technologies Limited, Bangalore. PhD from VTU-RRC Belgaum and working as faculty in Electronics and Communication Department, JNN College of Engineering, Shivamogga, Karnataka, India. Email: [email protected]

Mrityunjaya V. Latte

Mrityunjaya V Latte received his BE in electrical engineering and ME in digital electronics from SDM College of Engineering & Technology, Dharwad, Karnataka, India. Dr Latte was awarded the PhD degree in 2004 for his work in digital signal processing. Presently, he is working as Principal, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Bangalore, Karnataka, India. His research interests include coding, image processing and multi-resolution transforms. He received a “Best paper” award in a National Conference NCSSS 2002 held at Coimbatore, India. Email: [email protected]