Blood Vessel Segmentation and Centerline Tracking Using Local Structure Analysis

Blood vessel visualization is important for improving planning and navigation of several interventional procedures. In this paper, we present a novel method for simultaneous blood vessel segmentation, centerline tracking and radius estimation. Our method is based on local structure analysis within the connected regions of the blood vessels. The proposed method is mainly divided into trunk analysis and bifurcation analysis. In the trunk analysis, the vessel is segmented using 2D cross-section analysis while in the bifurcation analysis, the vessel is segmented using

modified vesselness

. Our method was evaluated on angiogram images. When comparing the processing time for finding the blood vessel centerline, our proposed method was found to be on average more than 20 times faster than multiscale

vesselness

with thinning and more than 7 times faster than our own earlier method of blood vessel centerline extraction. Also, the centerline extraction was found to be accurate with a mean error less than 1 voxel in comparison to the corresponding geometric centers.