Automated Anatomy-Based Tracking of Systemic Arteries in Arbitrary Field-of-View CTA Scans

We propose an automated pipeline for vessel centerline extraction in 3-D computed tomography angiography (CTA) scans with arbitrary fields of view. The principal steps of the pipeline are body part detection, candidate seed selection, segment tracking, which includes centerline extraction, and vessel tree growing. The final tree-growing step can be instantiated in either a semi- or fully automated fashion. The fully automated initialization is carried out using a vessel position regression algorithm. Both semi-and fully automated methods were evaluated on 30 CTA scans comprising neck, abdominal, and leg arteries in multiple fields of view. High detection rates and centerline accuracy values for 38 distinct vessels demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.