Aneurysm identification by analysis of the blood-vessel skeleton.

At least 1% of the general population have an aneurysm (or possibly more) in their cerebral blood vessels. If an aneurysm ruptures, it kills the patient in up to 60% of cases. In order to choose the optimal treatment, clinicians have to monitor the development of the aneurysm in time. Nowadays, aneurysms are typically identified manually, which means that the monitoring is often imprecise since the identification is observer dependent. As a result, the number of misdiagnosed cases may be large. This paper proposes a fast semi-automatic method for the identification of aneurysms which is based on the analysis of the skeleton of blood vessels. Provided that the skeleton is accurate, the results achieved by our method have been deemed acceptable by expert clinicians.