Segmentation and analysis of pulmonary blood vessel from X-ray CT images

Methods are proposed that allow the 3-D pulmonary structure to be reconstructed by automatic segmentation and analysis of pulmonary blood vessels with 1-cm thickness in chest X-ray CT images. Techniques are fully described for enhancement of the edges in a set of CT images and measurement of the line width in binary images. The results suggest that the segmented blood vessels are accurately extracted and that the measured values are effective for 3-D reconstruction, which is studied separately. >