Skeleton-based abdominal aorta registration technique.

ABSTRACT

Vascular diseases are the most challenging health problems in developed countries. The vascular segmentation as well as registration techniques are the topics of past and ongoing research activities. In this work we target an abdominal aorta registration technique. The developed methodology is useful in the assessment of abdominal aortic aneurysm treatment by visualizing the correspondence between pre- and postoperative Computed Tomography (CT) data. The presented approach makes it possible to match all voxels belonging to the aorta from different CT series. It is based on aorta lumen segmentation and graph matching method. To segment the lumen area a hybrid level-set active contour approach is used. The matching step is performed based on a path similarity skeleton graph matching procedure. The registration results have been tested on the database of 8 patients, for which two different contrast-enhanced CT series were acquired. All registration results achieved with our system and verified by an expert prove the efficiency of the approach and encourage to further develop this method.