Fast Centerline Extraction Algorithm for Colon Detection

Centerline Extraction is one of the crucial components in order to improve the performance of computer aided detection of colon lumen.In this paper,a fast centerline extraction algorithm based on Maximal Spanning Tree(FMST) is proposed.Specifically,FMST cuts off the boundary voxels to speed up the traditional Maximal Spanning Tree(MST) algorithm.Furthermore,based on searching strategy of boundary points primary and sourcepoint secondary,the key points which trend to the centers are kept,while the performance of the algorithm is improved by redundancy points reduction.The experimental results on 10 simulated colon models with centerline standard and 2 colon CT image series show that FMST is much faster than MST(speed up 80%) while preserves the accuracy of centerline(with 96.98%overlap rate).