MICCAI 2013 - LNCS 8149-8151

Anatomical Labeling of the Circle of Willis Using Maximum A Posteriori Graph Matching

David Robben¹, Stefan Sunaert², Vincent Thijs³, Guy Wilms², Frederik Maes¹, and Paul Suetens¹

¹iMinds - Medical Image Computing (ESAT/PSI), KU Leuven, Belgium
david.robben@esat.kuleuven.be

²Department of Radiology, University Hospitals Leuven, KU Leuven, Belgium

³Department of Neurology, University Hospitals Leuven, KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract. A new method for anatomically labeling the vasculature is presented and applied to the Circle of Willis. Our method converts the segmented vasculature into a graph that is matched with an annotated graph atlas in a maximum a posteriori (MAP) way. The MAP matching is formulated as a quadratic binary programming problem which can be solved efficiently. Unlike previous methods, our approach can handle non tree-like vasculature and large topological differences. The method is evaluated in a leave-one-out test on MRA of 30 subjects where it achieves a sensitivity of 93% and a specificity of 85% with an average error of 1.5 mm on matching bifurcations in the vascular graph.

Keywords: Graph matching, vasculature, anatomical labeling, Circle of Willis, MAP

LNCS 8149, p. 566 ff.

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