Description

A novel method based on a strategic combination of the active appearance model (AAM), live wire (LW), and graph cuts (GCs) for abdominal 3-D organ segmentation is proposed in this paper. The proposed method consists of three main parts: model building, object recognition, delineation. In the model building part, we construct the AAM and train the LW cost function and GC parameters. In the recognition part, a novel algorithm is proposed for improving the conventional AAM matching method, which effectively combines the AAM and LW methods, resulting in the oriented AAM (OAAM). A multiobject strategy is utilized to help in object initialization. For the object delineation part, a 3-D shape-constrained GC method is proposed. The object shape generated from the initialization step is integrated into the GC cost computation, and an iterative GC–OAAM method is used for object delineation.