Brain blood vessel segmentation using line-shaped profiles

Segmentation of cerebral blood vessels is of great importance in diagnostic and clinical applications, especially for embolization of cerebral aneurysms and arteriovenous malformations (AVMs). In order to perform embolization of the AVM, the structural and geometric information of blood vessels from 3D images is of utmost importance. For this reason, the in-depth segmentation of cerebral blood vessels is usually done as a fusion of different segmentation techniques, often requiring extensive user interaction. In this paper we introduce the idea of line-shaped profiling with an application to brain blood vessel and AVM segmentation, efficient both in terms of resolving details and in terms of computation time. Our method takes into account both local proximate and wider neighbourhood of the processed pixel, which makes it efficient for segmenting large blood vessel tree structures, as well as fine structures of the AVMs. Another advantage of our method is that it requires selection of only one parameter to perform segmentation, yielding very little user interaction. (paper)