Segmentation of liver tumor via nonlocal active contours

To reduce the manual labor time and provide the accuracy of liver tumor segmentation in the treatment planning of radiofrequency ablation (RFA), a novel method for liver tumor image segmentation by nonlocal active contours is proposed in this paper. A multi Gabor feature map of the liver tumor image is computed to describe the homogeneity of patches in a nonlocal way, and the nonlocal comparisons between pairs of patches are used to calculate the active contour energy. The whole energy function is minimized via a level set method to give the final segmentation. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method leads to good liver tumor segmentation with a good robustness to initialization condition. Experiment results show the proposed method can provide segmentation close to manual results, with the mean overlap error (OE) less than 23.86%.