Dual-pass feature extraction on human vessel images

We present a novel algorithm for the extraction of cavity features on images of human vessels. Fat deposits in the inner wall of such structure introduce artifacts, and regions in the images captured invalidating the usual assumption of an elliptical model which makes the process of extracting the central passage effectively more difficult. Our approach was designed to cope with these challenges and extract the required image features in a fully automated, accurate, and efficient way using two stages: the first allows to determine a bounding segmentation mask to prevent major leakages from pixels of the cavity area by using a circular region fill that operates as a paint brush followed by Principal Component Analysis with auto correction; the second allows to extract a precise cavity enclosure using a micro-dilation filter and an edge-walking scheme. The accuracy of the algorithm has been tested using 30 computed tomography angiography scans of the lower part of the body containing different degrees of inner wall distortion. The results were compared to manual annotations from a specialist resulting in sensitivity around 98 %, false positive rate around 8 %, and positive predictive value around 93 %. The average execution time was 24 and 18 ms on two types of commodity hardware over sections of 15 cm of length (approx. 1 ms per contour) which makes it more than suitable for use in interactive software applications. Reproducibility tests were also carried out with synthetic images showing no variation for the computed diameters against the theoretical measure.