title: Carotid Artery Wall Segmentation in Multispectral MRI by Coupled Optimal Surface Graph Cuts.
abstract: We present a new three-dimensional coupled optimal surface graph-cut algorithm to segment the wall of the carotid artery bifurcation from Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. The method combines the search for both inner and outer borders into a single graph cut and uses cost functions that integrate information from multiple sequences. Our approach requires manual localization of only three seed points indicating the start and end points of the segmentation in the internal, external, and common carotid artery. We performed a quantitative validation using images of 57 carotid arteries. Dice overlap of 0.86 ± 0.06 for the complete vessel and 0.89 ± 0.05 for the lumen compared to manual annotation were obtained. Reproducibility tests were performed in 60 scans acquired with an interval of 15 ± 9 days, showing good agreement between baseline and follow-up segmentations with intraclass correlations of 0.96 and 0.74 for the lumen and complete vessel volumes respectively.
authors.forename: Andrés M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Arias-Lorza
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Petersen
authors.forename: Arna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: van Engelen
authors.forename: Mariana
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Selwaness
authors.forename: Aad
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: van der Lugt
authors.forename: Wiro J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Niessen
authors.forename: Marleen
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: de Bruijne
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002339:Carotid Arteries / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D016893:Carotid Stenosis / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results