SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR BLOOD VESSEL BIFURCATION DETECTION IN THORACIC CT SCANS

摘要

A method for detecting blood vessel bifurcations in digital medical images includes inflating (61) a sphere from a first center point inside a segmented blood vessel until a surface of the sphere intersects a surface of the blood vessel, searching (62) within the inflated sphere for a second center point that has a sphere intersecting a surface of the blood with a maximum radius, assigning (63) all voxels of the maximal radius sphere to a root node of a shape-tree, increasing (64) the radius of the maximal radius sphere and computing a voxel difference set with respect to the previous maximal radius sphere, computing (65) one or more connected components Cm in the voxel difference set, assigning (67) voxels of each connected components to a different child node of the shape tree, connecting each child node with the root node, and calculating features from the shape tree for training a classifier to detect blood vessel bifurcations.