1. A method for detecting a main vessel in a volume represented by a digital voxel representation, the method comprising the steps of: applying a segmentation algorithm to the volume to create a first binary mask with one of a first class value and a second class value assigned to each voxel of the volume; applying a thresholding operation to the volume to obtain a second binary mask; subtracting the second binary mask from the first binary mask to generate a third binary mask; extracting from the third binary mask connected components by propagating labels to all adjacent voxels of the volume; computing features for each of the connected components; and preserving the connected components based on results of the step of computing features, and designating a preserved connected component as the vessel.