Segmentation and length measurement of the abdominal blood vessels in 3-D MRI images

Danilo Babin; Ewout Vansteenkiste; Aleksandra Pizurica; Wilfried Philips

doi:10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5333689

Segmentation and length measurement of the abdominal blood vessels in 3-D MRI images

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009:2009:4399-402. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5333689.

Authors

Danilo Babin¹, Ewout Vansteenkiste, Aleksandra Pizurica, Wilfried Philips

Affiliation

¹ Department of Telecommunications and Information Processing-TELIN-IPI-IBBT, Faculty of Sciences, Ghent University, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. dbabin@telin.ugent.be

PMID: 19964361
DOI: 10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5333689

Abstract

In diagnosing diseases and planning surgeries the structure and length of blood vessels is of great importance. In this research we develop a novel method for the segmentation of 2-D and 3-D images with an application to blood vessel length measurements in 3-D abdominal MRI images. Our approach is robust to noise and does not require contrast-enhanced images for segmentation. We use an effective algorithm for skeletonization, graph construction and shortest path estimation to measure the length of blood vessels of interest.

MeSH terms

Abdomen / blood supply*
Algorithms
Aorta, Abdominal / anatomy & histology*
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
Imaging, Three-Dimensional / methods*
Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*