An automatic method is presented to segment the internal carotid arteries through the difficult part of the skull base in CT angiography. The method uses the entropy per slice to select a cross sectional plane below the skull base. In this plane 2D circular structures are detected by the Hough transform. The center points are used to initialize a level set which evolves with a prior shape constraint on its topology. In contrast with some related vessel segmentation methods, our approach does not require the acquisition of an additional CT scan for bone masking. Experiments on twenty internal carotids in ten patients show that 19 seed points are correctly identified (95%) and 18 carotids (90%) are successfully segmented without any human interaction.

Date Published: 3 March 2007
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 6512, Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing, 65120I (3 March 2007);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6512:
Medical Imaging 2007: Image Processing
Josien P. W. Pluim; Joseph M. Reinhardt, Editor(s)