Carotid artery wall segmentation by coupled surface graph cuts

We present a three-dimensional coupled surface graph cut algorithm for carotid wall segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Using cost functions that highlight both inner and outer vessel wall borders, the method combines the search for both borders into a single graph cut optimization. Our approach requires little user interaction and can robustly segment the carotid artery bifurcation. Experiments on 32 carotid arteries from 16 patients show good agreement between manual segmentation performed by an expert and our method. The mean relative area of overlap is more than 85% for both lumen and outer vessel wall. In addition, differences in measured wall thickness with respect to the manual annotations were smaller than the in-plane pixel size.

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