Automated localisation and boundary identification of superficial femoral artery on MRI sequences

Abstract

In this paper, an automated method to localise the right superficial femoral artery (SFA) and identify its boundary on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences without contrast medium injection is proposed. Some anatomical knowledge combined with the mathematical morphology is used to distinguish SFA from other vessels. Afterwards, the directional gradient, continuity and the local contrast are applied as features to identify the artery's boundary using dynamic programming. The accuracy analysis shows that the system has average unsigned errors 3.1 ± 3.1% on five sequences compared to experts' manual tracings.