A nonsmoothing approach to the estimation of vessel contours in angiograms

Accurate and fully automatic assessment of vessel (stenoses) dimensions in angiographic images has been sought as a diagnostic tool, in particular for coronary heart disease. Here, the authors propose a new technique to estimate vessel borders in angiographic images, a necessary first step of any automatic analysis system. Unlike in previous approaches, the obtained edge estimates are not artificially smoothed; this is extremely important since quantitative analysis is the goal. Another important feature of the proposed technique is that no constant background is assumed, this making it well suited for nonsubtracted angiograms. The key aspect of the authors' approach is that continuity/smoothness constraints are not used to modify the estimates directly derived from the image (which would introduce distortion) but rather to elect (without modifying) candidate estimates. Robustness against unknown background is provided by the use a morphological edge operator, instead of some linear operator (such as a matched filter) which has to assume known background and known vessel shape.