CT Image Based Liver Embolization Treatment Simulation

The liver cancer is of great malignancy, most of the patients who have liver cancer are not able to survive for more than one year. Although diagnostic ways towards it are improving, only 20% of patients could have the malignant part cut after they are diagnosed. What's more, after the operation, there still could be 30%～70% relapse rate.Embolization treatment is a kind of knubbly and non-operative treatment method. It is developped during 1980s. Because of its good curative effects on liver cancer, it's recommended as the best method in various kinds of non-operative treatments. Medical researches have pointed out that about 90-99 % of blood which is needed by liver cancer is supplied by the hepatic artery. Especially the enveloped tumors, their blood supply almost rely on the hepatic artery. The embolization treatment stops the hepatic artery from providing blood. As a result, the tumors will die from lacking of blood and oxygen. So by using embolization treatment on the hepatic artery, we can let most of the liver cancer cells die from lacking of blood and oxygen, while there is litter affection on the normal liver tissue: the blood supply of normal liver tissue wouldn't be significantly affected because there would be collateral circulation, so it would not lead to obvious hepatosis.This paper is based on the liver segmentation work in the lab. The liver pipeline structures are extracted from living human CT data. The simulation results of liver embolization treatment towards liver pipeline could help doctors observe the the blood supply situation after the embolization treatment is taken more intuitively, then they could evaluate the effect of the embolization treatment they take.The main part of the work include:1. Process the living human CT data which is the format of Dicom, build the 3D morphological model of liver, and display the liver virtually and digitally.2. Extract the pipeline structures of liver(i.e. the hepatic artery) by using the algorithm of region grow.3. Simulate the embolization situation upon the pipeline structures which have been extracted in step 2. After the embolization is finished, transform the distance of blood vessel and liver tissue. Confirm the blood supply situation of liver tissue after embolization, and display it in 3D.4. Calculate the volume of liver and the tumor which is embolizated, provide reference for real embolization operations.