Adaptive segmentation of cerebrovascular tree in time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography

Med Biol Eng Comput. 2008 Jan;46(1):75-83. doi: 10.1007/s11517-007-0244-4. Epub 2007 Sep 6.

Abstract

Accurate segmentation of the human vasculature is an important prerequisite for a number of clinical procedures, such as diagnosis, image-guided neurosurgery and pre-surgical planning. In this paper, an improved statistical approach to extracting whole cerebrovascular tree in time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography is proposed. Firstly, in order to get a more accurate segmentation result, a localized observation model is proposed instead of defining the observation model over the entire dataset. Secondly, for the binary segmentation, an improved Iterative Conditional Model (ICM) algorithm is presented to accelerate the segmentation process. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm can obtain more satisfactory segmentation results and save more processing time than conventional approaches, simultaneously.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Blood Vessels / anatomy & histology
  • Brain / blood supply*
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Magnetic Resonance Angiography / methods*
  • Phantoms, Imaging