An Enhanced Approach to Intelligent Computer-Assisted Localization of Liver Tumor on Computed Tomography Images

Computed Tomography (CT) Imaging is frequently used to find liver cancer. CT imaging of the liver generates cross-sectional images of the abdominal region. The task of segmenting a liver tumor on CT images is tedious due to the anatomic complexity of the liver. Therefore, liver tumor detection has been performed manually or semi-automatically which is an exhaustive process. Further, a tumor may be present on only some slices of the CT scan and hence there is a need to automatically identify images that contain tumors from acquired CT images and then locate a region of the tumor on those images for further diagnosis. Automatic detection helps the radiologist to obtain fast, accurate, and effective results. Accordingly, in this paper, an enhanced approach is proposed based on deep learning, efficient fuzzy c-means (EFCM) clustering, and a region-based algorithm for the detection of a liver tumor. A deep learning model built on a convolutional neural network is used to identify whether the CT image contains a tumor. If it contains the tumor, then the proposed EFCM and region-based algorithms are applied to locate the tumor on the CT image. The EFCM algorithm is combined with a region-based technique to automatically determine the initial pixel and threshold values required to segment the liver tumor. The proposed method is applied to several CT abdominal images. The results of the tumor segmentation are validated by comparing them with the tumor regions detected by radiologists. The estimated results of the experiment show that the proposed technique successfully detects the liver tumor on the CT image with less than 2% relative error.