Accurate, fast, and robust vessel contour segmentation of CTA using an adaptive self-learning edge model

We present an efficient algorithm for the robust segmentation of vessel contours in Computed Tomography Angiography (CTA) images. The algorithm performs its task within several steps based on a 3D Active Contour Model (ACM) with refinements on Multi-Planar Reconstructions (MPRs) using 2D ACMs. To be able to distinguish true vessel edges from spurious, an adaptive self-learning edge model is applied. We present details of the algorithm together with an evaluation on n=150 CTA data sets and compare the results of the automatic segmentation with manually outlined contours resulting in a median dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 92.2%. The algorithm is able to render 100 contours within 1.1s on a Pentium®4 CPU 3.20 GHz, 2 GByte of RAM.

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