3-D segmentation and quantitative analysis of inner and outer walls of thrombotic abdominal aortic aneurysms

An abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is an area of a localized widening of the abdominal aorta, with a frequent presence of thrombus. A ruptured aneurysm can cause death due to severe internal bleeding. AAA thrombus segmentation and quantitative analysis are of paramount importance for diagnosis, risk assessment, and determination of treatment options. Until now, only a small number of methods for thrombus segmentation and analysis have been presented in the literature, either requiring substantial user interaction or exhibiting insufficient performance. We report a novel method offering minimal user interaction and high accuracy. Our thrombus segmentation method is composed of an initial automated luminal surface segmentation, followed by a cost function-based optimal segmentation of the inner and outer surfaces of the aortic wall. The approach utilizes the power and flexibility of the optimal triangle mesh-based 3-D graph search method, in which cost functions for thrombus inner and outer surfaces are based on gradient magnitudes. Sometimes local failures caused by image ambiguity occur, in which case several control points are used to guide the computer segmentation without the need to trace borders manually. Our method was tested in 9 MDCT image datasets (951 image slices). With the exception of a case in which the thrombus was highly eccentric, visually acceptable aortic lumen and thrombus segmentation results were achieved. No user interaction was used in 3 out of 8 datasets, and 7.80 ± 2.71 mouse clicks per case / 0.083 ± 0.035 mouse clicks per image slice were required in the remaining 5 datasets.