A new tube detection filter for abdominal aortic aneurysms

Abstract

Tube detection filters (TDFs) are useful for segmentation and centerline extraction of tubular structures such as blood vessels and airways in medical images. Most TDFs assume that the cross-sectional profile of the tubular structure is circular. This assumption is not always correct, for instance in the case of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs). Another problem with several TDFs is that they give a false response at strong edges. In this paper, a new TDF is proposed and compared to other TDFs on synthetic and clinical datasets. The results show that the proposed TDF is able to detect large non-circular tubular structures such as AAAs and avoid false positives.