A gray-level thinning method for delineation and representation of arteries

The quantification of three dimensional (3D) properties of coronary arteries is of significant importance. The performance of the 3D analysis is critically based on low-level representation of the arterial tree for different projections. A skeletal representation of arteries can provide appropriate data structure for registration of multiple angiographic projections and it can be further utilized for 3D reconstruction of the arterial tree. This paper presents an automated method for extracting the skeletal points of an arterial tree directly from the gray-level information without determining the edges a priori. It offers the advantage of improved reliability compared to methods based on detecting dual edges of the arteries. Novel application of filtering techniques provide accurate estimates of the statistics of the background. A recursive search scheme is used to aggregate the skeletal representation at multiple resolutions. Results on a set of Digitally Subtracted Angiograms (DSA) have been presented.