Automatic Segmentation of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm in Computed Tomography Images Using Spatial Fuzzy C-Means

Abstract

Abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is a cardiovascular disease which mostly appears in elderly people. Due to the weakening of aortic wall, a rupture occurs in the most inner layer of aorta and a thrombus is generated. If the diameter exceeds greater than 5.5 cm, a treatment strategy is required. As a result, CT imaging is utilized to screen and evaluate thrombus parameters for treatment. Exploitation of automatic techniques improves the pre- and post-treatment evaluation. In this paper, at first an algorithm based on spatial fuzzy c-means is applied to the CT image. Then lumen and thrombus are segmented automatically by tuning of morphological operators and thresholding parameters.