Fuzzy-based extraction of vascular structures from time-of-flight MR images

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2009:150:816-20.

Abstract

In this paper an automatic fuzzy based method for the extraction of the cerebrovascular system from 3D Time-of-Flight (TOF) MRA image sequences is presented. In order to exclude non-brain tissue an automatic skull stripping method is applied in a preprocessing step. Based on the TOF images vesselness and maximum parameter images are computed first. These parameter images are then combined with the TOF sequence using a fuzzy inference. The resulting fuzzy image offers an improved enhancement of small as well as malformed vessels against the remaining brain. Finally, the fuzzy-connectedness approach is used to extract the vascular system. A first evaluation showed that the fuzzy-based method proposed performs better than a state of the art method and yields results in the range of the inter-observer variation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Blood Vessels / anatomy & histology*
  • Blood Vessels / physiopathology
  • Fuzzy Logic*
  • Humans
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging*
  • Stroke / diagnosis
  • Stroke / physiopathology