Abstract #1435

Computer-Aided Arteriovenous Malformation Nidus Segmentation from 3D Time-Of-Flight MRA Datasets

Nils Daniel Forkert¹, Till Illies¹, Einar Goebell¹, Jens Fiehler¹, Heinz Handels²

¹Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; ²Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Luebeck, Luebeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

This work presents a computer-assisted method for the segmentation of the arteriovenous malformation nidus from time-of-flight (TOF) MRA datasets. Therefore, the cerebrovascular system is automatically extracted from the TOF dataset and used for a voxel-wise support vector machine classification into nidus and non-nidus vascular structures based on four features. The resulting classification dataset is used for extracting the nidus using 3D region growing. An evaluation based on fifteen datasets with available manual nidus segmentations from two observers demonstrated that the computer-aided method leads to segmentation results within the range of the inter-observer agreement but with a considerably reduced interaction time.