Patient-specific liver deformation modeling for tumor tracking

We present a new method for patient-specific liver deformation modeling for tumor tracking. Our method focuses on deforming two main blood vessels of the liver - hepatic and portal vein - to utilize them as features. A novel centerline editing algorithm based on ellipse fitting is introduced for vessel deformation. Centerline-based blood vessel model and various interpolation methods are often used for generating a deformed model at the specific time t. However, it may introduce artifacts when models used in interpolation are not consistent. One of main reason of this inconsistency is the location of bifurcation points differs from each image. To solve this problem, our method generates a base model from one of patient's CT images. Next, we apply a rigid iterative closest point (ICP) method to the base model with centerlines of other images. Because the transformation is rigid, the length of each vessel's centerline is preserved while some part of the centerline is slightly deviated from centerlines of other images. We resolve this mismatch using our centerline editing algorithm. Finally, we interpolate three deformed models of liver, blood vessels, tumor using quadratic Bezier curves. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with the real patient data.