Abdominal vessel segmentation using vessel model embedded fuzzy C-means and similarity from CT angiography

The accurate abdominal vessel segmentation of CT angiography (CTA) data is essential for diagnosis and surgical planning. However, accurate abdominal vessel segmentation is a difficult problem since the following challenges: (1) complex abdominal vessel structure containing a wide range size of vessel branches, (2) low contrast of small vessels, and (3) uneven distribution of vessel grayscale. With full consideration of the challenges, we propose an automatic vessel segmentation algorithm. For challenge 1, the algorithm's framework is divided into large and small vessel segmentation and has the following steps. Firstly, a vessel model embedded fuzzy c-means (VMEFCM) method with full consideration of challenge 2 is presented to obtain the initial vessel voxels. Then, considering challenge 3, a large vessel segmentation method based on the initial vessel voxels, similarity, and morphologic is proposed. Finally, a small vessel segmentation method based on spine is described. Extensive analysis is carried out on simulation datasets and 78 CTA datasets. The experimental results indicate that each step of the algorithm achieves the prospective results, and the proposed algorithm is effective and accurate with low computational cost. The dice, sensitivity, Jaccard coefficient, and precision rate were 93.7±2.8%, 93.7±2.8%, 88.2±4.8%, and 94.2±7.5% respectively.