Therapeutic utility of the tumor segmentation process, applied to PET-CT images [Utilidad terapéutica: Del proceso de segmentación tumoral, aplicado a imágenes de PET-CT]

Abstract

In this work findings derived from the application of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, in a patient with tumors, are identified. The tumors require of segmentation and quantification process before and after those therapies. In order to obtain the morphology of such tumors and their volumes, a computational technique used in 3D images of positron emission tomography (PET) fused with computed tomography (CT), belonging to a pediatric patient diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), is proposed. The proposed technique is divided into two stages: pre-processing and segmentation. The pre-processing is based on the application of a filtering process based on global enhancement similarity (GSE) to raise the quality of the information in the images. For tumors segmentation a technique based on region growing is considered. The NHL volumes derived from segmentation, are useful for both clinical monitoring lymphoma and analysis of therapeutic procedure.