Automatic segmentation of the carotid artery bifurcation region with a region-growing approach

The original contribution is to propose an intensity-based segmentation algorithm for extracting the carotid artery bifurcation region and validate the proposed solution on real patients' CTA data. The proposed homogeneity criteria allow the production of locally smooth segmentations and prevent excessive growth into neighboring tissues of similar densities. The obtained segmentation results are compared to manual findings of a radiologist and measured with the Dice similarity coefficient (D-si). This technique has been shown to be a reliable tool as effective as top state-of-the-art methods (D-si = 93.6% +/- 3.5%). (C) 2013 SPIE and IS&T