Quantifying stage progress of cirrhotic livers based on statistic shape models

It is widely known that morphological changes of the liver and the spleen occur during the clinical course of chronic liver diseases. In this paper, we show a preliminary study on quantifying stage progress of cirrhotic liver based on statistical shape models (SSMs). We constructed not only the liver SSM, but also the spleen SSM and a joint SSM of the liver and the spleen for a morphologic analysis of the cirrhotic liver in CT images. The effective modes are selected based on both its accumulation contribution rate and its correlation with doctor's opinions (stage labels). Both normal and abnormal livers including temporal sequence data are projected to the subspace with the selected modes. Most of the normal data are located in the center, while abnormal data are scattered around the normal data. If the disease progresses, data will move outside. The distance to the center can be used to quantify the stage progress of the cirrhotic liver.