Robust infrarenal aortic aneurysm lumen centerline detection for rupture status classification

The objective of this work is to develop a robust method for human abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) centerline detection that can contribute to the accurate computation of features for the prediction of AAA rupture risk. A semiautomatic algorithm is proposed for detecting the lumen centerline in contrast-enhanced abdominal computed tomography images based on online adaboost classifiers, which does not require prior image segmentation. The algorithm was developed and applied to thirty ruptured and thirty unruptured AAA image data sets and the tortuosities of the detected centerline were measured to assess the correlation between AAA tortuosity and the binary ruptured and unruptured labels. The lumen of each data set was segmented manually by a trained radiologist and the resulting centerlines of each data set were defined as the gold standard to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithm and to compare it against two widely used segmentation techniques. The average mean relative accuracy of the offline adaboost classifier is 91.9% with a standard deviation of 1.6%; for the online adaboost classifier it is 93.6% with a standard deviation of 1.9% (p < 0.05). The online adaboost classifier outperforms the offline adaboost classifier while their computational costs are similar. Aneurysm tortuosity computed from an accurately derived lumen centerline using online adaboost is statistically higher for ruptured aneurysms compared to unruptured aneurysms, indicating that tortuosity can be used to assess rupture risk in the vascular clinic.