Extracting the aorta centerline in contrast-enhanced MRI

Abstract

We propose a semi-automatic approach for aorta centerline extraction in contrast-enhanced MRI, making aorta length analysis feasible on large scale. Starting from user-specified start and end regions, we extract the aorta path in between the regions automatically. The extraction is formulated as an optimization problem, seeking for the path that most likely runs central to the aorta. To this end, we exploit that the aorta distinguishes from the surrounding by strong image gradients that point inwards to the aorta’s center due to contrast-enhanced imaging. We also include additional means of manual guidance to resolve erroneous cases. Experiments on data of 19 subjects yielded results that are close to the inter-reader variability. The average distance to the ground truth was 1.89 ± 1.54 mm, while aorta lengths deviated by only 0.66 ± 0.49 %.