Enhancement of aortic dissections in CT Angiography: Are common filters robust enough?

Aortic dissection is an acute condition of the aorta. It typically starts with an intimal tear and continues with the separation of the aortic wall layers. This situation typically leads to the creation of a second lumen, i.e., the false lumen, where blood can flow into. For diagnosis of this pathology, computed tomography angiography (CTA) is usually used. To have a better understanding of its causes and for measuring cross- sectional caliber at onset and at each follow-up, segmentation of true and false lumen is important in clinical use. In this work, a pipeline for aortic dissection segmentation is evaluated to obtain the correct visualization of true and false lumen separated by the dissection flap that characterizes this pathology. We provide an evaluation of three different vessel enhancement filters, used as a pre-processing step, through both a qualitative and quantitative evaluation.