3D segmentation of the true and false lumens on CT aortic dissection images

摘要

Our works are related to aortic dissections which are a medical emergency and can quickly lead to death. In this paper, we want to retrieve in CT images the false and the true lumens which are aortic dissection features. Our aim is to provide a 3D view of the lumens that we can difficultly obtain either by volume rendering or by another visualization tool which only directly gives the outer contour of the aorta; or by other segmentation methods because they mainly directly segment either only the outer contour of the aorta or other connected arteries and organs both. In our work, we need to segment the two lumens separately; this segmentation will allow us to: distinguish them automatically, facilitate the landing of the aortic prosthesis, propose a virtual 3d navigation and do quantitative analysis. We chose to segment these data by using a deformable model based on the fast marching method. In the classical fast marching approach, a speed function is used to control the front propagation of a deforming curve. The speed function is only based on the image gradient. In our CT images, due to the low resolution, with the fast marching the front propagates from a lumen to the other; therefore, the gradient data is insufficient to have accurate segmentation results. In the paper, we have adapted the fast marching method more particularly by modifying the speed function and we succeed in segmenting the two lumens separately.