Analysis of Centerline Extraction in Three-Dimensional Scale Space - Extracting Centerline of Vessels in Hepatic Artery

Recent developments in medical imaging technology have enabled us to acquire high-resolution datasets within a few minutes. It is important for a physician to recognize three-dimensional structure of vessels prior to any vascular treatments. However, extracting this structure is not a simple image processing task. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to extract hepatic artery from CT datasets through exhaustive searching method. The results for both simulated vessels and real datasets are presented. We also compared our method with two other methods regarding centerline extraction of vessels.