Segmentation of Cerebrovascular Anatomy from TOF-MRA Using Length-Strained Enhancement and Random Walker

Cerebrovascular rupture can cause a severe stroke. Three-dimensional time-of-flight (TOF) magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) is a common method of obtaining vascular information. This work proposes a fully automated segmentation method for extracting the vascular anatomy from TOF-MRA. The steps of the method are as follows. First, the brain is extracted on the basis of regional growth and path planning. Next, the brain’s highlighted connected area is explored to obtain seed point information, and the Hessian matrix is used to enhance the contrast of image. Finally, a random walker combined with seed points and enhanced images is used to complete vascular anatomy segmentation. The method is tested using 12 sets of data and compared with two traditional vascular segmentation methods. Results show that the described method obtains an average Dice coefficient of 90.68%, and better results were obtained in comparison with the traditional methods.