Co—dimension 2 geodesic active contours for MRA segmentation

Abstract

Automatic and semi-automatic magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) segmentation techniques can potentially save radiologists large amounts of time required for manual segmentation and can facilitate further data analysis. The proposed MRA segmentation method uses a mathematical modeling technique which is well-suited to the complicated curve-like structure of blood vessels. We define the segmentation task as an energy minimization over all 3D curves and use a level set method to search for a solution. Our approach is an extension of previous level set segmentation techniques to higher co-dimension.