Christian Payer who has successfully finished his master thesis in our institute in May of this year, has been nominated as one of nine “Runners Up for Student Best Paper Awards” at the MICCAI conference (www.miccai2015.org) in Munich in October 2015. Now, the scientific work by the current PhD-Student is done in a cooperation of the Technical University Graz and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Clinical-Forensic Imaging. At the MICCAI conference, Christian Payer was honored for his publication about “Automatic artery-vein separation from thoracic CT images using integer programming”.

picture: 3 D image of the lung vessels (copyright: LBI-LVR)

ABSTRACT Automated computer-aided analysis of lung vessels has shown to yield promising results for non-invasive diagnosis of lung diseases. In order to detect vascular changes affecting arteries and veins differently, an algorithm capable of identifying these two compartments is needed. We propose a fully automatic algorithm that separates arteries and veins in thoracic computed tomography (CT) images based on two integer programs. The first extracts multiple subtrees inside a graph of vessel paths. The second labels each tree as either artery or vein by maximizing both, the contact surface in their Voronoi diagram, and a measure based on closeness to accompanying bronchi. We evaluate the performance of our automatic algorithm on 10 manual segmentations of arterial and venous trees from patients with and without pulmonary vascular disease, achieving an average voxel based overlap of 94.1% (range: 85.0% – 98.7%), outperforming a recent state-of-the-art interactive method.

Automatic artery-vein separation from thoracic CT images using integer programming – ResearchGate. Available from: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/282731632_Automatic_artery-vein_separation_from_thoracic_CT_images_using_integer_programming [accessed Oct 14, 2015].