Three-dimensional Segmentation of Blood Vessels from Intensity In-homogeneous Medical Images

Bukenya, Faiza; Awwad, Amir; Duan, Jinming; Ehling, Josef; Faas, Henryk; Bai, Li

Abstract

Blood vessel segmentation helps to know the progress of the disease during diagnosis. The presence of intensity in-homogeneity, conglutination tissue and noise in medical images has led to difficulty in extraction of different sizes of blood vessels, difficulty in separating vessels for further analysis (such as quantification of angiogenesis), difficulty in distinguishing vessels from non vessels. Most of the available techniques are 2D-based. Despite the fact that 2D-based segmentation is easy, it doesn't provide full information about anatomic structure. Most of the available 3D vessel segmentation techniques require human intervention and fail to segment different sizes of vessels. In this paper, a 3D hybrid approach for segmentation has been developed, based on white top hat scale space bilateral hessian vessel enhancement filter and hysteresis threshold method combined with multi-threshold Otsu method. The hybrid method can address noise and intensity in-homogeneity problem, as a result, more vessels of different sizes are detected. The method can also incorporate spatial information, abnormalities in the vessels are detected. Vessels of different sizes are separated to ease further analysis. Conglutination tissue (that obstruct segmentation process) is eliminated to ease extraction of different sizes of vessels.

Citation

Bukenya, F., Awwad, A., Duan, J., Ehling, J., Faas, H., & Bai, L. (2018). Three-dimensional Segmentation of Blood Vessels from Intensity In-homogeneous Medical Images. In 2018 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) (1508-1514). https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI.2018.8628675

• Conference Name: 2018 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)
• Conference Location: Bangalore, India
• Start Date: Nov 18, 2018
• End Date: Nov 21, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jan 31, 2019
• Publication Date: 2018-11
• Deposit Date: Aug 3, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 3, 2020
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 1508-1514
• Book Title: 2018 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)
• ISBN: 978-1-5386-9277-6
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI.2018.8628675
• Keywords: three-dimension, segmentation, medical imaging, blood vessels, image processing
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1817625
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8628675
• Additional Information: © 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.