Biomedical Imaging Group Rotterdam, Departments of Radiology and Medical Informatics, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2018 May 30;13(5):e0197180. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0197180. eCollection 2018.
Centerline extraction of the carotid artery in MRI is important to analyze the artery geometry and to provide input for further processing such as registration and segmentation. The centerline of the artery bifurcation is often extracted by means of two independent minimum cost paths ranging from the common to the internal and the external carotid artery. Often the cost is not well defined at the artery bifurcation, leading to centerline errors. To solve this problem, we developed a method to cooperatively extract both centerlines, where in the cost to extract each centerline, we integrate a constraint region derived from the estimated position of the neighbor centerline. This method avoids that both centerlines follow the same cheapest path after the bifurcation, which is a common error when the paths are extracted independently. We show that this method results in less error compared to extracting them independently: 10 failed centerlines Vs. 3 failures in a data set of 161 arteries with manual annotations. Additionally, we show that the new method improves the non-cooperative approach in 28 cases (p < 0.0001) in a data set of 3,904 arteries.
MRI 中颈动脉的中心线提取对于分析动脉的几何形状以及为进一步处理（如配准和分割）提供输入非常重要。动脉分叉处的中心线通常通过从颈总动脉到颈内动脉和颈外动脉的两条独立的最小成本路径来提取。由于成本在动脉分叉处没有很好地定义，因此会导致中心线错误。为了解决这个问题，我们开发了一种协作提取两条中心线的方法，在提取每条中心线的成本中，我们集成了一个约束区域，该区域来自于邻居中心线的估计位置。这种方法避免了两条中心线在分叉后都沿着同一条最便宜的路径走，这是当路径独立提取时常见的错误。我们发现，与独立提取相比，这种方法的错误更少：在 161 条带有手动注释的动脉数据集中，有 10 条失败的中心线，而 3 条失败。此外，我们发现，在 3904 条动脉的数据集中，新方法在 28 个病例中（p<0.0001）改进了非协作方法。
