Coronary artery center-line extraction using second order local features

Of interest is the accurate and robust delineation of vessel center-lines for complete arterial tree structure in coronary angiograms which is an imperative step towards 3D reconstruction of coronary tree and feature-based registration of multiple view angiograms. Most existing center-line tracking methods encounter limitations in coping with abrupt variations in local artery direction and sudden changes of lumen diameter that occur in the vicinity of arterial lesions. This paper presents an improved center-line tracing algorithm for automatic extraction of coronary arterial tree based on robust local features. The algorithm employs an improved scanning schema based on eigenvalues of Hessian matrix for reliable identification of true vessel points as well as an adaptive look-ahead distance schema for calculating the magnitude of scanning profile. In addition to a huge variety of clinical examples, a well-established vessel simulation tool was used to create several synthetic angiograms for objective comparison and performance evaluation. The experimental results on the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm and its counterparts under difficult situations such as poor image quality and complicated vessel geometry are presented.