Automated segmentation and anatomical labeling of abdominal arteries based on multi-organ segmentation from contrast-enhanced CT data

Abstract

A fully automated method is described for segmentation and anatomical labeling of the abdominal arteries from contrast-enhanced CT data of the upper abdomen. By assuming that the regions of the organs and aorta have already been automatically segmented, the problem is formulated as extracting and selecting the optimal paths between the organ and aorta regions based on a basic anatomical constraint that arteries supplying blood to an organ consist of tree structures whose root nodes are located in the aorta region and leaf nodes in the organ region. Using the constraint, the proposed method solves both of artery segmentation and anatomical labeling. In addition, the method is robust against topological variability of the branching patterns. Experimental results using 10 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method was effectively applied to several kinds of the abdominal arteries, which include the hepatic, splenic, and renal arteries. The average F-measure, which is a normalized accuracy measure taking both false positives and true negatives into account, was 0.89 for the proposed and 0.74 for the previous methods. The method could also effectively deal with topological variability of the hepatic and renal arteries. © Springer-Verlag 2013.