This work presents a hybrid method for 2D artery vessel segmentation and diameter measurement in X-Ray angiograms. The proposed method is novel in that tracking-based and model-based approaches are combined. A robust and efficient tracking template, the "annular template", is devised for vessel tracking. It can readily be applied on X-Ray angiograms without any preprocessing. Starting from an initial tracking point given by the user the tracking algorithm iteratively repositions the annular template and thereby detects the vessel boundaries and possible bifurcations. With a user selected end point the tracking process results in a set of points that describes the contour and topology of an artery vessel segment between the initial and end points. A "boundary correction and interpolation" operation refines the extracted points which initialize the Snakes algorithm. Boundary correction adjusts the points to ensure that they lie on the vessel segment of interest. Boundary interpolation adds more points, so that there are sufficiently many points for the Snakes algorithm to generate a smooth and accurate vessel segmentation. After the application of Snakes the resulting points are sequentially connected to represent the vessel contour. Then, the diameters are measured along the extracted vessel contour. The segmentation and measurement results are compared with manually extracted and measured vessel segments. The average Precision, Recall and Jaccard Index of 21 vessel samples are 91.5%, 92.1% and 84.9%, respectively. Compared with ground truth measurements of diameters the average relative error is 8.2%, and the average absolute error is 1.13 pixels.

Date Published: 14 March 2011
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 7962, Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing, 79623V (14 March 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.877999

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7962:
Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing
Benoit M. Dawant; David R. Haynor, Editor(s)