Segmentation of the Rectus Abdominis Muscle Anterior Fascia for the Analysis of Deep Inferior Epigastric Perforators

Abstract

The segmentation of the anterior fascia of the rectus abdominis muscle is an important step towards the analysis of abdominal vasculature. It may advance Computer Aided Detection tools that support the activity of clinicians who study vessels for breast reconstruction using the Deep Inferior Epigastric Perforator flap. In this paper, we propose a two-fold methodology to detect the anterior fascia in Computerized Tomographic Angiography volumes. First, a slice-wise thresholding is applied and followed by a post-processing phase. Finally, an interpolation framework is used to obtain a final smooth fascia detection. We evaluated our method in 20 different volumes, by calculating the mean Euclidean distance to manual annotations, achieving subvoxel error. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.