A deformable surface model for vascular segmentation.

Inspired by the motion of a solid surface under liquid pressure, this paper proposes a novel deformable surface model to segment blood vessels in medical images. In the proposed model, the segmented region and the background region are respectively considered as liquid and an elastic solid. The surface of the elastic solid experiences various forces derived from the second order intensity statistics and the surface geometry. These forces cause the solid surface to deform in order to segment vascular structures in an image. The proposed model has been studied in the experiments on synthetic data and clinical data acquired by different imaging modalities. It is experimentally shown that the new model is robust to intensity contrast changes inside blood vessels and thus very suitable to perform vascular segmentation.