Automatic segmentation of pulmonary arterial tree in computer tomography images: Segmentación automática del árbol arterial pulmonar en imágenes TAC

Arterial tree segmentation is a major step for pulmonary embolism analysis and detection. The present document proposes a technique applied to CT images already diagnosed as embolism positive. In order to perform the segmentation of the arterial tree, the lung´s region is transformed into a mask, so that the processed volume gets reduced. Then, through thresholding, region growing, and morphological operations the arterial tree is segmented in 3D. The proposed technique was evaluated by means of arterial counting in each segmented slice as well as in the original ones. That technique got a 93.72% of arterial matching on six datasets of CT images.