Title: Application of fuzzy connectedness in 3D blood vessel extraction

Authors: Xinrong Lv, Hua Zou

Addresses: College of Information and Control Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China), 739 North 1st Road, Dongying, 257061, Shandong, China. ' Computer School of Wuhan University, Wuhan University, Luojia Mountain, Wuhan, 430079, Hubei, China

Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) segmentation of blood vessels plays a very important role in solving some practical problems such as diagnosis of vessels diseases. Because of the effective segmentation for 2D images, the fuzzy connectedness segmentation method is introduced to extract vascular structures from 3D blood vessel volume dataset. In the experiments, three segmentation methods including thresholding method, region growing method and fuzzy connectedness method are all used to extract the vascular structures, and their results are compared. The results indicate that fuzzy connectedness method is better than thresholding method in connectivity of segmentation results, and better than region growing method in precision of segmentation results.

Keywords: blood vessel segmentation; fuzzy connectedness; blood vessels; volume dataset; region growing; blood vessel extraction; vascular structures.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBRA.2010.037986

International Journal of Bioinformatics Research and Applications, 2010 Vol.6 No.5, pp.461 - 471

Published online: 07 Jan 2011 *

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