Abstract
Blood vessels visualization in brain region is an important prerequisite for a number of clinical procedures such as diagnosis, image-guided neurosurgery, and pre-surgical planning. At the clinical scene, it has been used to MIP (maximum intensity projection) method for the MRA image. The MIP is useful method, however MIP has a problem that the vessels are hidden by non-brain tissues like skin and fat structures.Then, these unnecessary parts have been manually deleted by operators, and the workload of this task has become a great burden for the operators. In order to the above problem, this paper presents a simple and fast brain segmentation method for the blood vessels visualization. Our method has attention to the structural feature of the brain MRA image, and the full-automatic skull stripping is realized using Minimum Intensity Projection(MinIP) and the region growing method. In our experiments, the proposed method is evaluated with clinical datasets. As the results, it is seen that our method provides sufficient accuracy for clinical use, and the computational costs of our method is about half compared with the manual work by operators.
