Title: Segmentation for pulmonary artery from mediastinum to lung in CTA datasets

Authors: Jiehui Zhang; Zhongshi He; Jamshid Dehmeshki

Addresses: College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, China; Department of Computer Science, Xi'an University of Science and Technology, Xi'an Shanxi 710054, China ' College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400030, China ' The Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 2EE, UK

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for segmenting and tracking pulmonary artery tree from mediastinum to lung in computed tomography angiography images. An algorithm based on region growing and slice marching methods is proposed for vessel tree tracking, and the approach also combines with context-contour-based mediastinum segmentation, feature map filter, and 3D morphological techniques to assist the track of pulmonary artery in avoiding leakage problem. We have evaluated our method on 18 continuous clinical patient data and demonstrated its ability to correctly separate pulmonary arteries from other blood vessels, and robustly handle noise.

Keywords: pulmonary artery tracking; computed tomography angiography; CTA; region growing; mediastinum segmentation; image segmentation; lung; CT images; vessel tree tracking; feature map filters; 3D morphology; pulmonary arteries; blood vessels.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICA.2013.052353

International Journal of Innovative Computing and Applications, 2013 Vol.5 No.1, pp.37 - 46

Received: 19 Oct 2011
Accepted: 06 Nov 2011
Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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