Intestinal region reconstruction of ileus cases from 3D CT images based on graphical representation and its visualization

This paper proposes an intestinal region reconstruction method from CT volumes of ileus cases. Binarized intestine segmentation results often contain incorrect contacts or loops. We utilize the 3D U-Net to estimate the distance map, which is high only at the centerlines of the intestines, to obtain regions around the centerlines. Watershed algorithm is utilized with local maximums of the distance maps as seeds for obtaining “intestine segments”. Those intestine segments are connected as graphs, for removing incorrect contacts and loops and to extract “intestine paths”, which represent how intestines are running. Experimental results using 19 CT volumes showed that our proposed method properly estimated intestine paths. These results were intuitively visualized for understanding the shape of the intestines and finding obstructions.