Laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is an attractive analytical technique for the direct analysis of samples found in the geology, biology, and the environmental and material sciences. However, few reports have discussed the difficulty found in the analysis of curved surface samples by LA-ICP-MS where the main focus is on the curved surface. In this work, LA-ICP-MS was used to map the elemental images of curved surface samples by segmentation and recombination. In addition, the influence of parameters, such as laser spot size, laser fluence, repetition rate, scan speed, dwell time and washout time on lateral resolution were investigated. The developed method was applied to the imaging analysis of lanthanum in an alumina ceramic tube, and the results showed that lanthanum was not uniformly distributed in the tube.