Extraction of blood vessel in CT angiography image aided by fuzzy logic

To diagnose cerebral diseases, visual perception for the cerebrovascular system is essential. We propose a method for segmenting the cerebrovascular region from the computed tomography angiography (CTA) images. By segmenting it, we can generate the surface shade display, which is appropriate for evaluating the morphology. The proposed method first derives a rough image by combining a raw image and the difference image. The difference image is obtained by applying a Laplacian filter. For the rough image, the venae and arteries are segmented by fuzzy inference. The method then extracts the Willis ring contacting the blood vessels based on region growing techniques. The experimental result shows that our method can extract the blood vessels in CTA images with high accuracy.