Interactive 3D liver vessels centerline extraction based on moving sphere model

The extraction of the centerlines of liver vessels in CT scans images is essential to blood supply analysis and surgery planning. In this paper, a novel method for extracting centerlines based on moving sphere model from liver blood vessels datasets are presented. The root of the vessels is chosen by the user. Then the center point with biggest radius is found by searching the six neighborhoods according to the selected point, which is set as the initial moving sphere. By traversing the vertexes on the spherical surface, proper centers for the next moving spheres with current radius would be found. The radius of searching spheres will be decreased by one if there are no spheres with current radius meeting the criteria for being a sphere. The procedure continues until no more spheres could be found meeting the criteria for being a sphere. Finally the connections of the centers of the moving spheres are the centerlines of the vessels. The preliminary results show the proposed method can extract the centerlines of the main vessels.