Detection of Blood Vessels on the Abdominal CT Images Employing Temporal Subtraction Method

In recent years, various imaging techniques have been introduced into medical fields for extraction of abdominal area such as magnetic resonance imaging, high resolution helical computed tomography scanners with multi-detector rows, and positron emission tomography etc. Especially, HRCT is one of the useful diagnosis systems because it provides high resolution images to physician. In the field of abdominal CT images, it is very important to understand blood vessel structures of a patient before operation. Furthermore, in the medical imaging field, segmentation is one of the most important problems. Many related segmentation techniques have been developed for automatic extraction of regions of interest. On the other hand, temporal subtraction method attempt to remove normal structures in the CT images, so that abnormalities can be observed more clearly to the medical doctor, it is mainly applied to chest radiography image. With the subtraction technique, image warping for accurately deforming the previous image to match the current image is very important. If the warping is incorrect, normal structures will produce artifacts in the subtraction image, and the image quality can be degraded. In this paper, we apply temporal subtraction method to abdominal CT images in order to detect the blood vessel region for analyzing the internal organ. In this method, the temporal subtraction method is applied between successive phases. The proposed technique is applied to four abdominal CT images and satisfactory results are achieved