Automated hierarchical partitioning of anatomical trees
Rafael Wiemker, Thomas Bülow, Roland Opfer · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
A robust, fast and generally applicable algorithm is presented for the splitting of anatomical trees such as vessel and airway trees into meaningful subtrees, which relies on a straightforward mathematical objective function and produces subjectively very satisfactory results. The algorithm is applicable to unstructured 2D or 3D voxel sets or undirected graphs of centerlines with unknown anatomical root point as produced by unsupervised segmentation algorithms. The automated tree splitting improves clinical tree segmentation tasks by replacing tedious manual three-dimensional navigation and editing.