Automatic Lower Extremity Vessel Extraction based on Bone Elimination Technique in CT Angiography Images

In this paper, we propose an automatic lower extremity vessel extraction based on rigid registration and bone elimination techniques in CT and CT angiography images. First, automatic partitioning of the lower extremity based on the anatomy is proposed to consider the local movement of the bone. Second, rigid registration based on distance map is performed to estimate the movement of the bone between CT and CT angiography images. Third, bone elimination and vessel masking techniques are proposed to remove bones in CT angiography image and to prevent the vessel near to bone from eroding. Fourth, post-processing based on vessel tracking is proposed to reduce the effect of misalignment and noises like a cartilage. For the evaluation of our method, we performed the visual inspection, accuracy measures and processing time. For visual inspection, the results of applying general subtraction, registered subtraction and proposed method are compared using volume rendering and maximum intensity projection. For accuracy evaluation, intensity distributions of CT angiography image, subtraction based method and proposed method are analyzed. Experimental result shows that bones are accurately eliminated and vessels are robustly extracted without the loss of other structure. The total processing time of thirteen patient datasets was 40 seconds on average.