Automatic clutter-free volume rendering for MR angiography using fuzzy connectedness

In MR and CT angiography, clutter due to artifacts or nearby high-intensity structures, such as other uninteresting vessels and bone (in CT), prevents clear visualization of the vessel under investigation. In this paper, we offer an alternative to the manual editing that is commonly used to remove clutter. The method is automatic and requires the user to point at structures on a 3D MIP display. The method utilizes recently developed fuzzy connected object delineation algorithms to extract the vessels of interest. Since the resulting definition is nonbinary, it can be displayed via MIP or more sophisticated volume rendering.