A simple method for accurate liver volume estimation by use of curve-fitting: a pilot study

In this paper, we describe the effectiveness of our curve-fitting method by comparing liver volumes estimated by our new technique to volumes obtained with the standard manual contour-tracing method. Hepatic parenchymal-phase images of 13 patients were obtained with multi-detector CT scanners after intravenous bolus administration of 120-150 mL of contrast material (300 mgI/mL). The liver contours of all sections were traced manually by an abdominal radiologist, and the liver volume was computed by summing of the volumes inside the contours. The section number between the first and last slice was then divided into 100 equal parts, and each volume was re-sampled by use of linear interpolation. We generated 13 model profile curves by averaging 12 cases, leaving out one case, and we estimated the profile curve for each patient by fitting the volume values at 4 points using a scale and translation transform. Finally, we determined the liver volume by integrating the sampling points of the profile curve. We used Bland-Altman analysis to evaluate the agreement between the volumes estimated with our curve-fitting method and the volumes measured by the manual contour-tracing method. The correlation between the volume measured by manual tracing and that estimated with our curve-fitting method was relatively high (r = 0.98; slope 0.97; p < 0.001). The mean difference between the manual tracing and our method was -22.9 cm(3) (SD of the difference, 46.2 cm(3)). Our volume-estimating technique that requires the tracing of only 4 images exhibited a relatively high linear correlation with the manual tracing technique.