Extraction of the thoracic aorta territory and aneurysm from CT images

Recently, transluminally placed endovascular prosthetic grafts is considered providing as a low-invasion treatment for aortic aneurysm. A stent graft, a kind of artificial blood vessel, is inserted and kept in an aneurysm to prevent rupture of the blood vessel. Stent graft design is a burden for doctors. Objective of our study is to develop a stent graft design support system. This paper proposes a method that extracts the thoracic aorta territory and aneurysm from contrast helical computer tomography (CT) images. The blood flow territory is extracted by successive region growing. This method estimates the blood vessel section by evaluating the contours of the blood flow territory section. A three-dimensional mask is generated by using estimated sections. The aorta territory and aneurysm are extracted from the masked CT images. The results of application to clinical CT images are also shown.