A 3-D moment based approach for blood vessel detection and quantification in MRA

Abstract

This paper describes a new method for the three-dimensional (3-D) tracking and the quantification of blood vessels from magnetic resonance angiography (MRA). The approach is based on 3-D geometrical moments and consists of the following steps: (1) interactive selection of 3-D seed points; (2) automatic tracking of the vessels; (3) local computation of both diameter and orientation; (4) rendering of the vessels. This detection and estimation scheme has been validated on simulated and real data.