A study on CT aorta segmentation using vessel enhancement diffusion filter and region growing

Medical imaging in clinical diagnoses and treatment has been increasingly important, and CT scan has been applied more widely. It is important to extract blood vessels structure for improving planning and navigating in interventional procedures. However, the complexity of vascular structures and the limitation of angiography equipment make vessel segmentation from CT images more challenging. A method for extracting abdominal aorta from CT images is proposed based on vessel enhancing diffusion filters and three-dimensional region growing algorithm. In order to certify the proposed method, a group of clinical CT image series is used and the results show that the proposed method is an effective way for improving the accuracy of abdominal aorta segmentation.