Segmentation of brain blood vessels using projections in 3-D CT angiography images

Segmenting cerebral blood vessels is of great importance in diagnostic and clinical applications, especially in quantitative diagnostics and surgery on aneurysms and arteriovenous malformations (AVM). Segmentation of CT angiography images requires algorithms robust to high intensity noise, while being able to segment low-contrast vessels. Because of this, most of the existing methods require user intervention. In this work we propose an automatic algorithm for efficient segmentation of 3-D CT angiography images of cerebral blood vessels. Our method is robust to high intensity noise and is able to accurately segment blood vessels with high range of luminance values, as well as low-contrast vessels.