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Length increasing active contour for the segmentation of small blood vessels
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Figure 2: Segmentation of a synthetic image. 1) Result
with the Chan and Vese method, and 2) result with our
(a) (b) (c) (d)
method. The blue curve represent the initialization.
Figure 4: Vessel segmentation, image taken from [8]:
a) input image, b) initialization, c) segmentation with
(6) without the length increasing term (α = 0), and
d) segmentation with (6).
Figure 3: Illustration of the oriented curvature term. of C. Regions where φ(x) ≥ 0 corresponds to the ob-
Left) Quiver plots of the smoothed curvature vectors ject of interest while its complement corresponds to the
G ∗ κ~n close to the interface. This corresponds to the background. Starting from initial position φ(x, t = 0),
yellow dashed area of Fig. 2. Right) Illustration of the the equation for evolving the curves C with respect to
modulus of the curvature |G ∗ κ~n| for the whole image. t, with force F acting along the normal direction, is [1]:
∂t = |∇φ|F, where F can be composed from the fol-
∂φ
Other intensity distributions may also be envisioned. The normal vectors can be computed by using ~n =
The use of (6) as a vessel segmentation method will be ∇φ/|∇φ|. As for the curvature, κ, it can be computed
illustrated in Sec. 3. in 2D by using the formula for the mean curvature,
κ = ∇ · (∇φ/|∇φ|) [1]. In 3D, the formulation by
2.3 Adaptive Model for Vessel Segmentation Lorigo et al.[4] has been used. Finally, the effect of var-
ious forces on the lsf are restricted to regions close to
As indicated in Sec. 2.1 and although we think it is the zero level φ(x, t) = 0 by using the regularized Dirac
not a practical problem, the length increasing flow of function from [1]: δφ = π1 (1+φ 1
2 ) . As an example, the
(4) can be numerically unstable in some circumstances. level set evolution equation used for (6) in the case of
If this is a concern for an application, the modulus of 2D segmentation is:
the smoothed curvature term, h := |Gσ ∗ κ~n|, may still
∂φ ps (u) − pb (u) ∇φ
serve as an indicator function for highly curved region = δφ × − ν∇ · (7)
∂t ps (u) + pb (u) |∇φ|
at scale σ. Therefore, the influence of the curvature mo-
tion in those areas can be reduced by using a monotoni- ∇φ ∇φ ∇φ
+ α G∗∇· · .
cally decreasing function that depends on h. For exam- |∇φ| |∇φ| |∇φ|
ple, by removing α(Gσ ∗ κ~n)~n from (4), (5) or (6) and
by using ν · exp(|Gσ ∗ κ~n|) · κ~n in place of νκ~n. 3 Experiments with 2D and 3D images
2.4 Level Set Implementation The performance of the vessel segmentation model
(6) is first demonstrated on a vessel image taken from
The curve propagation equations from (1), (4), (5) [8], see Fig. 4. The parameters for the pixel intensity
and (6) have been implemented using the level set distribution models were estimated from the initial po-
framework. Within this framework, a set of closed sition of the contour, illustrated in Fig. 4-b). Other pa-
curves C on Ω ⊂ RN , N ∈ {2, 3} is represented by the rameters were hand-picked by trial and error. In a first
intersection of a surface φ(r) : Ω → RN +1 and of the attempt, the parameter α was set to zero, effectively
zero level. By convention, φ(x), called Level Set Func- canceling out the length increasing force, and the oth-
tion (lsf ), is approximately a signed distance function ers as follows: ν = 4 and σ = 8. The contour was
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Figure 6: Aorta and MAPCAs segmentation on a 3D
Figure 5: 2D segmentation on a slice from a CTA vol- CTA volume without (top row) and with (bottom row)
ume. Top row: input image and initialization, bottom our length increasing term.
row: results using (6) without (left) and with (right) our
length increasing term.
References
evolved until it stagnates. In a second attempt, we re- [1] T. F. Chan and L. Vese. Active contours without edge.
peat the same procedure, but with α = 12 × ν. With- IEEE Trans. Image Process., Volume 10(2):266–277,
out our length increasing term, it was impossible to seg- February 2001.
ment the smaller vessel. A similar experiment was also [2] G. Charpiat, R. Keriven, J.-P. Pons, and O. Faugeras.
conducted on a 2D MPR view of a 3D CTA dataset, as Designing spatially coherent minimizing flows for varia-
shown on Fig. 5. Here, we wanted to segment the aorta tional problems based on active contours. In ICCV, 2005.
and the surrounding vasculature for surgical planning [3] A. F. Frangi, W. J. Niessen, K. L. Vincken, and M. A.
purposes [7]. The parameters for the intensity model Viergever. Multiscale vessel enhancement filtering. In
MICCAI’98, 1998.
were also estimated from the initial contour position
[4] L. Lorigo, O. Faugeras, W. Grimson, R. Keriven, R. Kiki-
and we used the same value for the other parameters. nis, A. Nabavi, and C.-F. Wesin. Curves: Curve evolution
Again, our length increasing term allowed the contour for vessel segmentation. Medical Image Analysis, 5:195–
to progress farther in thin elongated structures. Finally, 206, 2001.
the effectiveness of our method was demonstrated in 3D [5] R. Manniesing, B. Velthuis, M. van Leeuwen, I. van der
on a CTA dataset. The initial position of the contour Schaaf, P. van Laar, and W. Niessen. Level set based
was given by 8 spherical seeds placed by a user inside cerebral vasculature segmentation and diameter quan-
the aorta and surrounding vasculature. The results are tification in CT angiography. Medical Image Analysis,
shown in Fig. 6 and are an indication that our length 10(2):200–214, April 2006.
increasing term performs well in 3D. [6] R. Manniesing, M. A. Viergever, and W. J. Niessen. Ves-
sel enhancing diffusion: A scale space representation of
vessel structures. Medical Image Analysis, 10(6):200–
4 Conclusion 214, Decembre 2006.
[7] D. Rivest-Hénault, L. Duong, C. Lapierre, S. Deschênes,
A practical length increasing active contour model and M. Cheriet. Semi-automatic segmentation of major
has been introduced in this paper. Preliminary exper- aorto-pulmonary collateral arteries for image guided pro-
cedures. In SPIE Med. Imag., 2010.
iments on both 2D and 3D datasets indicate that our
[8] G. Sundaramoorthi, A. Yezzi, A. C. Mennucci, and
new model greatly improves the propagation of the con- G. Sapiro. New possibilities with sobolev active con-
tour through thin elongated structures. Although this tours. Int. J. Comput. Vis., 84:113–129, 2009.
method can be numerically unstable in theory, it appears [9] C. M. van Bemmel, L. J. Spreeuwers, M. A. Viergever,
to be well behaved in practice as this didn’t cause any and W. J. Niessen. Level-set-based artery–vein separation
problem during our experiments. In future works, we in blood pool agent ce-mr angiograms. IEEE Trans. Med.
plan to conduct theoretical analysis of the stability con- Imag., 22:1224–1234, 2003.
ditions. Also, a formal evaluation of our segmentation
model for aorta and MAPCAs segmentation in clinical
situations will be done.
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