A new morphological tool to extract blood vessels in cross sectional MRI

In this paper, we propose a new method of mathematical morphology called Aurora transform. This is a geodesic reconstruction that only spreads in radial orientations from a center. Thanks to this method, star domains such as blood vessels in cross sectional planes are extracted even if these regions are often inhomogeneous or some parts of their edges are not drawn very well. This method has been successfully applied to extract the edges of the aortic root, the ascending and the descending aorta in cross sectional cine-MRI. It has been then compared to the use of some active contours.