Improved vessel enhancement for fully automatic coronary modeling

Vincent Auvray; Uwe Jandt; Raoul Florent; Dirk Schäfer

doi:10.1117/12.810144

27 March 2009 Improved vessel enhancement for fully automatic coronary modeling

Vincent Auvray, Uwe Jandt, Raoul Florent, Dirk Schäfer

Proceedings Volume 7259, Medical Imaging 2009: Image Processing; 72592B (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.810144
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2009, Lake Buena Vista (Orlando Area), Florida, United States

Abstract

3D coronary modeling extracts the centerlines and width of the coronary arteries from a rotational sequence of angiographies. This process heavily relies on a preliminary filtering of the 2D angiograms that enhances the vessels. We propose an improved vessel enhancement method specifically designed for this application. It keeps the advantages of Hessian-based extraction methods (speed, robustness, multiscale) while bypassing its more important limitations: the blurring of bifurcations, and the incomplete filling of very large vessels. The major contributions of this paper are twofold. First, the classical centered kernel used in Hessian-based methods is substituted with an elongated off-centered kernel. The new filter detects the different orientations involved at a bifurcation: it can answer properly to 'half vessels' beginning at the considered pixel (as opposed to the centered classical filter). The proposed "semi-oriented ridge" filter is also more robust to noise, and it stays multi-scale and quickly computable. Second, an original bifurcation detection and enhancement method is presented, based on the following heuristics: "bifurcations have three vessels (at least) in their immediate neighborhood". More precisely, the semi-oriented ridges answers in each tested orientation θ∈]-π,π] are stored in a circular histogram. The proposed bifurcation energy is the height of the third peak in this histogram: it will have a significant value at bifurcations only. The performance of the complete framework is demonstrated both on the produced vessel maps and on the final modeling results.

Citation Download Citation

Vincent Auvray, Uwe Jandt, Raoul Florent, and Dirk Schäfer "Improved vessel enhancement for fully automatic coronary modeling", Proc. SPIE 7259, Medical Imaging 2009: Image Processing, 72592B (27 March 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.810144

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