Model-based segmentation and motion analysis of the thoracic aorta from 4D ECG-gated CTA images.

Pathologies of the thoracic aorta can alter the shape and motion pattern of the aorta throughout the cardiac cycle. For diagnosis and therapy planning, determination of the aortic shape and motion is important. We introduce a new approach for segmentation and motion analysis of the thoracic aorta from 4D ECG-CTA images, which combines spatial and temporal tracking, motion determination by intensity-based matching, and 3D fitting of vessel models. The approach has been successfully applied to 30 clinically relevant 4D CTA image sequences. We have also performed a quantitative evaluation of the segmentation accuracy.