Radiometric homogenization of the color cryosection images from the VHP lungs for 3D segmentation of blood vessels.

This work deals with the problem of radiometric inhomogeneities found on the physical color images of the anatomical cryosections from the Visible Human Project (VHP) male body. Our goal is to extract very thin structures, like the blood vessel tree from the lungs. Current segmentation methods applied to VHP color images are disturbed by discontinuous, inter-slice radiometric variations; we thus devised an adaptive correction that is propagated along a series of parallel slices, taking advantage of the structural coherence between consecutive slices. No blurring is introduced, and fine details and texture are respected. Results of 3D segmentation of fine blood vessels on the corrected volume are presented.