Segmentation of elongated structures processed on breast MRI for the detection of vessels

The multi-seed region growing (MSRG) algorithm from previous work is extended to extract elongated segments from breast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) stacks. A model is created to adjust the MSRG parameters such that the elongated segments may reveal vessels that can support clinicians in their diagnosis of diseases or provide them with useful information before surgery during e. g. a neoadjuvant therapy. The model is a pipeline of tasks and contains user-defined parameters that influence the segmentation result. A crucial task of the model relies on a skeletonization-like algorithm that collects useful information about the segments’ thickness, length, etc. Length, thickness, and gradient information of the pixel intensity along the segment helps to determine whether the extracted segments have a tubular structure, which is assumed to be the case for vessels. In this work, we show how the results are derived and that the MSRG algorithm is capable of extracting vessel-like segments even from noisy MR images.