We present a pulmonary vessel segmentation algorithm, which is fast, fully
automatic and robust. It uses a coarse segmentation of the airway tree and a
left and right lung labeled volume to restrict a vessel enhancement filter,
based on an offset medialness function, to the lungs. We show the application
of our algorithm on contrast-enhanced CT images, where we derive a clinical
parameter to detect pulmonary hypertension (PH) in patients. Results on a
dataset of 24 patients show that quantitative indices derived from the
segmentation are applicable to distinguish patients with and without PH.
Further work-in-progress results are shown on the VESSEL12 challenge dataset,
which is composed of non-contrast-enhanced scans, where we range in the
midfield of participating contestants.Comment: Part of the OAGM/AAPR 2013 proceedings (1304.1876