Removal of abdominal wall for 3D visualization and segmentation of organs in CT volume

3D visualization and segmentation of organs in abdominal volume images are important in medical image processing for applications such as diagnosis, treatment and surgical planning. However, the abdominal wall leads to difficulties in both visualization and segmentation. These difficulties can be eliminated by removing the abdominal wall. This paper presents an algorithm that removes abdominal wall by registering a 3D flipping-free deformable model to the inner boundary of the wall. To our best knowledge, it is the first work in removing the abdominal wall for the purpose of 3D visualization and segmentation of the organs.