Enhancement of Vascular Structures in 3D and 2D Angiographic Images

A number of imaging techniques are being used for diagnosis and treatment of vascular pathologies like stenoses, aneurysms, embolisms, malformations and remodelings, which may affect a wide range of anatomical sites. For computer-aided detection and highlighting of potential sites of pathology or to improve visualization and segmentation, angiographic images are often enhanced by Hessian based filters. These filters aim to indicate elongated and/or rounded structures by an enhancement function based on Hessian eigenvalues. However, established enhancement functions generally produce a response, which exhibits deficiencies such as poor and non-uniform response for vessels of different sizes and varying contrast, at bifurcations and aneurysms. This may compromise subsequent analysis of the enhanced images. This paper has three important contributions: i) reviews several established enhancement functions and elaborates their deficiencies, ii) proposes a novel enhancement function, which overcomes the deficiencies of the established functions, and iii) quantitatively evaluates and compares the novel and the established enhancement functions on clinical image datasets of the lung, cerebral and fundus vasculatures.