Fast and Automatic Segmentation of Ascending Aorta in MSCT Volume Data

The segmentation of the ascending aorta from multislice computed tomography (MSCT) volume data is one of the critical steps for the quantitative analysis coronary artery. In this paper, a fast and automatic iterative method is presented. The method locates the volume of interest (VOI) of the ascending aorta and detects the seed point automatically. Then an automatic iterative procedure is implemented adaptively to segment the aorta slice by slice. The method was evaluated in various clinical datasets using three criteria: the sensitivity to noise, the successful rate and the running time. Experiments show that the method is robust and achieves a successful rate as high as 95.1% within 1.5 second in average.