Acceleration of the fully automatic branch labeling of voxel vessel structures

For diagnosing a stenosis or an aneurysm, the shape parameters of the diseased vessel parts are needed by physicians. Therefore, a fully-automatic extraction of this shape from a volume representation has been developed. This paper analyses the blood vessel branch labeling acceleration algorithms and proposes two improved methods. The first one is called the surface wave propagation method which restricts the wave moving along the blood vessel surface. The second one replaces the thinning algorithm with the surface propagation to extract the center lines and the bifurcations of the blood vessels. Experiment results show that two improved methods can decrease the computation time and keep the labeling accuracy.