SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR 3D VESSEL SEGMENTATION WITH MINIMAL CUTS

A method for segmenting tubular structures in digital medical images includes extracting a subregion from a 3-dimensional (3D) digital medical image volume containing a vessel of interest, identifying potential vessel centerpoints for each voxel in the subregion by attaching to each voxel a tip of a 3D cone that is oriented in the direction of the voxel's image gradient and having each voxel within the cone vote for those voxels most likely to belong to a vessel centerline, selecting candidates for a second vote image that are both popular according to a first vote image, as well as being consistently voted upon by a radius image, reconfiguring the subregion as a graph where each voxel is represented by a node that is connected to 26 nearest neighbors by n-link edges, and applying a min-cut algorithm to segment the vessel within the subregion.