Automatic initialization algorithm for carotid artery segmentation in CTA images

  • Authors:
  • Martijn Sanderse;Henk A. Marquering;Emile A. Hendriks;Aad van der Lugt;Johan H. C. Reiber

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Radiology, Div. of Image Processing, LUMC, Leiden, The Netherlands;Dept. of Radiology, Div. of Image Processing, LUMC, Leiden, The Netherlands;ICT Group, Delft Univ. of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands;Dept. Of Radiology, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands;Dept. of Radiology, Div. of Image Processing, LUMC, Leiden, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • MICCAI'05 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Analysis of CT datasets is commonly time consuming because of the required manual interaction. We present a novel and fast automatic initialization algorithm to detect the carotid arteries providing a fully automated approach of the segmentation and centerline detection. First, the volume of interest (VOI) is estimated using a shoulder landmark. The carotid arteries are subsequently detected in axial slices of the VOI by applying a circular Hough transform. To select carotid arteries related signals in the Hough space, a 3-D, direction dependent hierarchical clustering is used. To allow a successful detection for a wide range of vessel diameters, a feedback architecture was introduced. The algorithm was designed and optimized using a training set of 20 patients and subsequently evaluated using 31 test datasets. The detection algorithm, including VOI estimation, correctly detects 88% of the carotid arteries. Even though not all carotid arteries have been correctly detected, the results are very promising.