Abstract: The skeletonization method has been widely used in image analysis and other areas．Using skeleton to express image can preserve the topological structure and reduce redundant information．In the clinical practice of diagnosis and treatment of lung disease,how to effectively represent and analyze the vascular structure is very important for computeraided diagnosis and surgery．In this paper,a vessel skeletonization method for lung CT image was proposed．Firstly,vessels were segmented from the thoracic tissues by region growing algorithm．Secondly,the morphological operators were used to deal with the vessel segmentation results．Finally,skeleton of blood vessels was obtained by three-dimentional thinning algorithm．Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately and efficiently extract vessel skeletons from lung CT image.

Key words: Lung CT image,Region growing,Morphology,Skeletonization