Automated extraction of aorta regions from 3D abdominal X-ray CT images using anatomical knowledge

摘要

This paper describes a method for automated extraction of aorta regions from 3D abdominal X-ray CT images using anatomical knowledge. We have developed the method for automated extraction of aorta regions, based on the shape recovery technique by the distance and the reverse distance transformations. However, in the case that the intensity contrast between abdominal organs and the aorta is low, mis-segmentation of other organs occurs in the shape modification process. The proposed method uses the Hough transformation in addition to the distance transformation to extract a medial line of the aorta. Also it uses the variance of CT values of recovered aorta region to prevent mis-segmentations. The proposed method is applied to twenty two cases of 3D abdominal X-ray CT images. The extraction results showed that aorta regions could be extracted satisfactorily and stably.