Patent ID: 8023711

Claim:
A method for the segmented representation of vessel-like structures of an object under examination on the basis of tomographic data, comprising: generating a three-dimensional tomographic volume data record of an object under examination having vessel-like internal structures; carrying out, using the generated tomographic volume data record, a segmentation which enhances the vessel-like structures in the representation of the tomographic data; determining, for each voxel of the tomographic volume data record, the probability with which the voxel is located in a vessel-like structure from environmental data of the voxel with the aid of a vessel-specific filter of a spatial dimension which corresponds to the tomographic volume data record, on a basis of Gaussian functions; and using the determined probabilities as criterion for the presence of a vessel in the segmentation process for the representation of the vessel-like structures, wherein the filter uses a linear combination of partial second-order derivations of a three-dimensional Gaussian function along a Cartesian coordinate axes, and wherein, and in the determining of the probability, an optimum orientation of the filter used is determined exclusively by optimized spatial alignment of the filter from the partial second-order derivation of the three-dimensional Gaussian function along a Cartesian x coordinate.