Station number assignment to abdominal lymph node for assisting gastric cancer surgery

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a method of the station number assignment to the abdominal lymph node for assisting gastric cancer surgery. In gastric cancer surgery, surgeons need to dissect not only the stomach but also surrounding lymph nodes. Therefore, it is important to understand the area where the lymph nodes exist prior to surgery. The proposed method assigns station numbers to each lymph node extracted from a CT volume. Since arteries are in close relation to the station numbers around the stomach, we utilise the arteries’ information for assigning the station numbers. The vessel dominant map is introduced to analyse the spatial relationships between the lymph nodes and the surrounding arteries. This map is computed based on three-dimensional Euclidean distance transformation. The proposed method classifies the lymph nodes into eight groups, which are defined by the station numbers, using the vessel dominant map. We evaluated the proposed method using 10 data sets that include 77 lymph nodes. Lymph node extraction and blood vessel labelling were performed manually on these volumes. The proposed method could label lymph node station numbers with an accuracy of 76.6%. This result showed that the proposed method was useful for assisting gastric cancer surgery.

KEYWORDS:

• Computer-aided surgery
• surgical planning
• laparoscopic surgery
• stomach
• distance transformation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank our colleagues for their suggestions and advice.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development [JP16ck0106036]; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JP26108006]; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [JP17H00867].