Method for automatically detecting systemic arteries in arbitrary field-of-view computed tomography angiography (CTA)

A method for analyzing a slice-based scanned image volume of a body represented by a digital image representation, the method comprising:

• determining a body region to which the slice-based scanned image volume belongs;
• determining expected vessel characteristics for vessels that are located in the determined body region, the expected vessel characteristics including vessel radii, thresholds for a measure of circularity of the respective vessels at a given position, vessel intensity value thresholds, and anatomy-based vessel segment connection rules;
• determining seed points in the image volume representing centers of vessels;
• tracking unconnected vessel segments with the seed points as a starting point by iteratively determining subsequent neighboring seed candidates which are selected based on a value representing a likeliness for a point of a slice-based representation belonging to one of the vessels including the expected vessel characteristics;
• and
• iteratively extending a vessel tree by connecting the unconnected vessel segments, applying a set of connection rules to the unconnected vessel segments in each iteration of the iteratively extending step based on the expected vessel characteristics, and terminating the iteration when none of a set of connection rules is fulfilled.