Extraction of aorta territory from helical CT images - application to the operation for removing aorta aneurysm

摘要

A transluminally placed endovascular is recently adopted in the operation for removing aneurysm. In the operation, a stent graft pre-installed in the catheter is developed inside the aorta to prevent the aneurysm breaking. For getting the long term stability, the stent graft should be made so that its 3D shape is very closed to the inner shape of the aorta. In order to achieve the fitting, the stent graft is designed manually and is made individually (custom made). There need some skills to design the stent graft and it is also very time consuming. An automated system has been required for achieving the efficient design. In this paper, we propose a method to provide the skeleton and the cross sections of aorta for the efficient design of the stent graft. The method was successfully applied to actual helical CT images.