3D geometric analysis of the aorta in 3D MRA follow-up pediatric image data
Stefan Wörz, Abdulsattar Alrajab, Raoul Arnold, Joachim Eichhorn, Hendrik von Tengg‐Kobligk, Jens‐Peter Schenk, Karl Rohr · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2014
We introduce a new model-based approach for the segmentation of the thoracic aorta and its main branches from follow-up pediatric 3D MRA image data. For robust segmentation of vessels even in difficult cases (e.g., neighboring structures), we propose a new extended parametric cylinder model which requires only relatively few model parameters. The new model is used in conjunction with a two-step fitting scheme for refining the segmentation result yielding an accurate segmentation of the vascular shape. Moreover, we include a novel adaptive background masking scheme and we describe a spatial normalization scheme to align the segmentation results from follow-up examinations. We have evaluated our proposed approach using different 3D synthetic images and we have successfully applied the approach to follow-up pediatric 3D MRA image data.