Application of fuzzy connectedness in 3D blood vessel extraction

Three-dimensional (3D) segmentation of blood vessels plays a very important role in solving some practical problems such as diagnosis of vessels diseases. Because of the effective segmentation for 2D images, the fuzzy connectedness segmentation method is introduced to extract vascular structures from 3D blood vessel volume dataset. In the experiments, three segmentation methods including thresholding method, region growing method and fuzzy connectedness method are all used to extract the vascular structures, and their results are compared. The results indicate that fuzzy connectedness method is better than thresholding method in connectivity of segmentation results, and better than region growing method in precision of segmentation results.