A METHOD, A SYSTEM AND A COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR SEGMENTING A STRUCTURE IN A DATASET

摘要

The method (1) according to the invention may be schematically divided into three major phases. Phase (2) comprises preparatory steps, namely the step (3) of acquiring a suitable dataset, which is then subjected to a suitable binary segmentation at step (4) results of which are being accessed at step (5). The results comprise temporally sequenced binary coded images, whereby image portions corresponding to blood are labeled as unity, the rest is set to zero. The subsequent phase (12) of the method according to the invention is directed to performing the image processing for segmenting a structure. At step (8) a computation is performed whereby a preceding binary coded image (8a) corresponding to a phase from the temporal sequence is subtracted from a subsequent binary coded image 8b corresponding to a phase yielding a multi-dimensional temporal feature map (8c). At step (9) spatial positions corresponding to a certain voxel value are derived and are used to segment the structure. A pre-defined deformable shape model is accessed at step (11), which is then deformed at step (14) in accordance with spatial coordinates, derived at step (9). Preferably, the segmentation result is stored at step (16). Finally, during a further phase (22) of the method according to the invention, the segmentation results are displayed at step (18) using suitable display means. Preferably, the segmented surface is overlaid on the original data using a two, three or four-dimensional visualization technique. Still preferable, to ease comprehension of the result, the segmented surface is presented as a color-code in a suitable transparency mode. The invention further relates to an apparatus and a computer program for segmenting a structure in a dataset.