Reconstructing the 3-D medial axes of coronary arteries in single-view cineangiograms

Describes a technique for reconstructing the skeletal structure of coronary arteries from a succession of frames of a single-view cineangiogram. The authors use local features in each frame to determine correspondences of arterial segments in successive frames. They define a similarity measure in 2D image space as the change in angular coordinates of corresponding pairs. They use a form of gradient descent to find those depth coordinates that minimize the average deviation of the 3D angular coordinates of all points on the skeleton from the coordinates produced by a 3D scaling transformation. In experiments with software models the reconstruction error was approximately two pixels when the initial guessed reconstruction was as large as 30 pixels.