Automatic segmentation of arterial tree from 3D computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA) scans

Computer Assisted Surgery

Tongxi Liu¹  Sheng Xie¹  Chi Zhang²  Haoyuan Zhang²  Mingxia Sun²  Yinan Wei² 

[1] Department of Radiology, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Beijing, Chin;School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Biomedical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China;

关键词: Pulmonary artery segmentation;    3D vessel enhancement;    fuzzy connectedness;    pulmonary embolism;   

DOI  :  10.1080/24699322.2019.1649077

来源: publisher

【 摘 要 】

Pulmonary embolism (PE) and other pulmonary vascular diseases, have been found associated with the changes in arterial morphology. To detect arterial changes, we propose a novel, fully automatic method that can extract pulmonary arterial tree in computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA) images. The approach is based on the fuzzy connectedness framework, combined with 3D vessel enhancement and Harris Corner detection to achieve accurate segmentation. The effectiveness and robustness of the method is validated in clinical datasets consisting of 10 CT angiography scans (6 without PE and 4 with PE). The performance of our method is compared with manual classification and machine learning method based on random forest. Our method achieves a mean accuracy of 92% when compared to manual reference, which is higher than the 89% accuracy achieved by machine learning. This performance of the segmentation for pulmonary arteries may provide a basis for the CAD application of PE.

【 授权许可】

CC BY