Intracranial vessel segmentation from time-of-flight MRA using pre-processing of the MIP Z-buffer: Accuracy of the ZBS algorithm

Abstract

We evaluate the accuracy of a vascular segmentation algorithm which uses continuity in the maximum intensity projection (MIP) depth Z-buffer as a pre-processing step to generate a list of 3D seed points for further segmentation. We refer to the algorithm as Z-buffer segmentation (ZBS). The pre-processing of the MIP Z-buffer is based on smoothness measured using the minimum χ2 value of a least square fit. Points in the Z-buffer with χ2 values below a selected threshold are used as seed points for 3D region growing. The ZBS algorithm couples spatial continuity information with intensity information to create a simple yet accurate segmentation algorithm. We examine the dependence of the segment..