Vascular segmentation in three-dimensional rotational angiography based on maximum intensity projections

Three-dimensional rotational angiography (3D-RA) is a relatively new and promising technique for imaging blood vessels. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D-RA vascular segmentation algorithm, which is fully automatic and very computationally efficient, based on the maximum intensity projections (MIP) of 3D-RA images. Validation results on 13 clinical 3D-RA datasets reveal that, according to the agreement between the segmentation results and the ground truth, our method (a) outperforms both the maximum a posteriori-expectation maximization (MAP-EM)-based method and the MAP-Markov random field (MAP-MRF)-based segmentation method, and (b) works comparably to the optimal global thresholding method. Experimental results also show that our method can successfully segment major vascular structures in 3D-RA and produce a lower false positive rate than that of the MAP-EM-based and MAP-MRF-based methods.