A technique is provided for automatically generating a bone mask in CTA
angiography. In accordance with the technique, an image data set may be
pre-processed to accomplish a variety of function, such as removal of
image data associated with the table, partitioning the volume into
regionally consistent sub-volumes, computing structures edges based on
gradients, and/or calculating seed points for subsequent region growing.
The pre-processed data may then be automatically segmented for bone and
vascular structure. The automatic vascular segmentation may be
accomplished using constrained region growing in which the constraints
are dynamically updated based upon local statistics of the image data.
The vascular structure may be subtracted from the bone structure to
generate a bone mask. The bone mask may in turn be subtracted from the
image data set to generate a bone-free CTA volume for reconstruction of
volume renderings.