To improve the precision of nerve segmentation in CT images, a new comparability function is proposed in this paper to enhance the contrast between nerve structure and other surrounding tissues. It is based on nerve's characteristic, i.e. dark tubular structure, and a thorough analysis of the multi-scale Hessian matrix. By comparability function, the gray range of interested nerve structure can be automatically determined, which combines the multi-scale Hessian matrix eigenvalues with intensity information of original nerve CT images. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm can not only enhance the continuous nerve of tubular structure, but also clearly reflect its bifurcations and crossovers. It is very important and significant to the computer-aided disease diagnosis of peripheral nervous system.

Date Published: 8 July 2011
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 8009, Third International Conference on Digital Image Processing (ICDIP 2011), 80091N (8 July 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.896498

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8009:
Third International Conference on Digital Image Processing (ICDIP 2011)
Ting Zhang, Editor(s)