Interactive 3D brain vessel segmentation from an example

Segmentation of cerebral vascular networks from 3D angiographic data remains a challenge. Automation generally induces a high computational cost and possible errors, while interactive methods are hard to use due to the dimension and complexity of images. This article presents a compromise between both approaches, by using the concept of example-based segmentation. Segmentation examples of vascular structures are involved in a scheme relying on connected filtering, in order to obtain an interactive -but strongly assisted-segmentation method. This strategy, which uses component-trees in a non-standard fashion, leads to promising results, when applied on cerebral MR angiographic data.