Computer-aided mesenteric small vessel segmentation on high-resolution 3D contrast-enhanced CT angiography scans

Weidong Zhang; Jiamin Liu; Jianhua Yao; Tan Nguyen; Adeline Louie; Stephen Wank; Ronald M. Summers

doi:10.1117/12.911841

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23 February 2012 Computer-aided mesenteric small vessel segmentation on high-resolution 3D contrast-enhanced CT angiography scans

Weidong Zhang, Jiamin Liu, Jianhua Yao, Tan Nguyen, Adeline Louie, Stephen Wank, Ronald M. Summers

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Proceedings Volume 8315, Medical Imaging 2012: Computer-Aided Diagnosis; 83151T (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.911841
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2012, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Segmentation of the mesenteric vasculature has important applications for evaluation of the small bowel. In particular, it may be useful for small bowel path reconstruction and precise localization of small bowel tumors such as carcinoid. Segmentation of the mesenteric vasculature is very challenging, even for manual labeling, because of the low contrast and tortuosity of the small blood vessels. Many vessel segmentation methods have been proposed. However, most of them are designed for segmenting large vessels. We propose a semi-automated method to extract the mesenteric vasculature on contrast-enhanced abdominal CT scans. First, the internal abdominal region of the body is automatically identified. Second, the major vascular branches are segmented using a multi-linear vessel tracing method. Third, small mesenteric vessels are segmented using multi-view multi-scale vesselness enhancement filters. The method is insensitive to image contrast, variations of vessel shape and small occlusions due to overlapping. The method could automatically detect mesenteric vessels with diameters as small as 1 mm. Compared with the standard-of-reference manually labeled by an expert radiologist, the segmentation accuracy (recall rate) for the whole mesenteric vasculature was 82.3% with a 3.6% false positive rate.

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Weidong Zhang, Jiamin Liu, Jianhua Yao, Tan Nguyen, Adeline Louie, Stephen Wank, and Ronald M. Summers "Computer-aided mesenteric small vessel segmentation on high-resolution 3D contrast-enhanced CT angiography scans", Proc. SPIE 8315, Medical Imaging 2012: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 83151T (23 February 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.911841

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