Abstract: Kidney segmentation is the key step for medical image analysis and non-invasive computer aided diagnosis.The region of kidney and renal cortex are extracted in order to compute the volume and thickness of the cortex.These measurements are used to assess the renal function and design the treatment planning.Based on the similarity between the consecutive slices of three dimensioal renal image,an automatic kidney and renal cortex segmentation algorithm with graph cuts and level sets was proposed in this paper.The slice with enough intensity contrast and high definition is taken as as the initial reference.Hough forest is applied in detecting the region of kidney to estimate its intensity distribution and acquire the energy function for the kidney segmentation.Then,mathematical morphology is used to achieve the rough contour of next slices.Based on the initial segmentation result,the initial contours are positioned and the level sets are used to partition the renal cortex.This processing will be continued until all sliced is segmented.The test results show that the proposed algorithm is effective to segment the kidney and renal cortex.

Key words: Medical image segmentation,Renal cortex,Graph cuts,Level sets