Digital subtraction CT angiography based on efficient 3D registration and refinement.
A novel method for fast, automatic 3D digital subtraction CT angiography (DS-CTA) is presented to generate artifact-free angiograms. The proposed method consists of two steps: 3D registration to align a CT image to the CT angiography (CTA) image and subtraction-and-refinement to extract blood vessels only. For efficient and accurate 3D registration in the first step, an normalized mutual information (NMI) based algorithm is adopted, and its fast version is developed by introducing a new measure. To further improve the subtracted image quality in the second step, a novel 3D refinement algorithm is suggested to effectively remove unwanted residuals. Experimental results of seven clinical CT/CTA head datasets demonstrate that cerebral vessels are well extracted from CTA images with almost no loss. The typical processing time is 3-9 min depending on the image size in a PC with a 2.4 GHz CPU.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 373-1, Guseongdong, Yuseonggu, Daejeon 305-701, South Korea.
Sung Min
SM
Kwon
Yong Sun
YS
Kim
Tae-Sung
TS
Kim
Jong Beom
JB
Ra
D000465:Algorithms; D002533:Cerebral Angiography / Q000379:methods*; D002560:Cerebrovascular Circulation; D006801:Humans; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed / Q000379:methods*