A strategy for atherosclerotic lesions segmentation

Abstract

The watersheds method is a powerful segmentation tool developed in mathematical morphology, which has the drawback of producing over-segmentation. In this paper, in order to prevent its over-segmentation, we present a strategy to obtain robust markers for atherosclerotic lesions segmentation of the thoracic aorta. In such sense, we introduced an algorithm, which was very useful in order to obtain the markers of atherosclerotic lesions. The obtained results by using our strategy were validated calculating the false negatives (FN) and false positives (FP) according to criterion of pathologists, where 0% for FN and less than 11% for FP were obtained. Extensive experimentation showed that, using real image data, the proposed strategy was very suitable for our application. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.