Extraction of the Aortic Dissection Membrane via Spectral Phase Information

Abstract

Streak/ring/motion artifacts, unequal distribution of the intravenously injected contrast agent and the partial volume effect lead to significant differences in brightness and contrast between CTA datasets or even between slices of the same dataset. These issues affecting the segmentation of fine structures such as the aortic dissection membrane can be efficiently addressed only by applying a measure invariant to luminance and contrast. Towards this end, the analysis of local phase information in the frequency domain using Log-Gabor wavelets achieves sub-mm accuracy when segmenting the dissection membrane by 3 new approaches. In order to avoid under-segmentation, as well as the inclusion of artifacts, this contribution extends phase congruency by proposing a novel scale space strategy, which consists of combining low-frequent, ”secure” structures only with adjoining filtering results of high-frequent nature. Our concept harmonizes with the principles of perceptual organization pertaining to the human visual cortex.