Automatic Level Set Based Cerebral Vessel Segmentation and Bone Removal in CT Angiography Data Sets

Computed tomography angiography (CTA) data sets without hardware based bone subtraction have the disadvantage of containing the bone structures which particularly overlap with vessel intensities; therefore vessel segmentation is hampered. Segmentation methods developed for CTA without bones can not handle these data sets and manual cerebral vessel segmentation is not realizable in clinical routines. Therefore, an automatic intensity based cerebral bone removal with subsequent edge based level set vessel segmentation method is presented in this work.