Random walks with adaptive cylinder flux based connectivity for vessel segmentation.

In this paper, we present a novel graph-based method for segmenting the whole 3D vessel tree structures. Our method exploits a new adaptive cylinder flux (ACF) based connectivity framework, which is formulated based on random walks. To avoid the shrinking problem of elongated structure, all existing graph-based energy optimization methods for vessel segmentation rely on skeleton or ROI extraction. As a result, the performance of these vessel segmentation methods then depends heavily on the skeleton extraction results. In this paper, with the help of ACF based connectivity framework, a global optimal segmentation result can be obtained without extracting skeleton or ROI. The classical issues of the graph-based methods, such as shrinking bias and sensitivity to seed point location, can be solved effectively with the proposed method thanks to the connectivity framework.