Iodine-enhanced Liver Vessel Segmentation in Photon Counting Detector-based Computed Tomography using Deep Learning

Liver vessel segmentation is important in diagnosing and treating liver diseases. Iodine-based contrast agents are typically used to improve liver vessel segmentation by enhancing vascular structure contrast. However, conventional computed tomography (CT) is still limited with low contrast due to energy-integrating detectors. Photon counting detector-based computed tomography (PCD-CT) shows the high vascular structure contrast in CT images using multi-energy information, thereby allowing accurate liver vessel segmentation. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based liver vessel segmentation method which takes advantages of the multi-energy information from PCD-CT. We develop a 3D UNet to segment vascular structures within the liver from 4 multi-energy bin images which separates iodine contrast agents. The experimental results on simulated abdominal phantom dataset demonstrated that our proposed method for the PCD-CT outperformed the standard deep learning segmentation method with conventional CT in terms of dice overlap score and 3D vascular structure visualization.