Statistical Cerebrovascular Segmentation in Three- Dimensional Rotational Angiography Based on Maximum Intensity Projections

Abstract. Vascular segmentation of three-dimensional rotational angiography (3D-RA) is important in the clinical environment since it can provide 3D information of vasculature before, during and after the treatments. This paper extends our prior work on vascular segmentation method for 3D-RA, which is based on maximum intensity projections (MIP). The method is fully automatic and computationally efficient. Experimental results on 12 3D-RA clinical datasets indicate that our method can produce segmentations of major vessels in the datasets, which are the current radiologists ' primary interest in this work. Moreover, the segmentations obtained by our method exhibit a high degree of agreement to the ground truth segmentations and are comparable to those produced by the optimal global thresholding method