3D coronary modeling extracts the centerlines and width of the coronary arteries from a rotational sequence
of angiographies. This process heavily relies on a preliminary filtering of the 2D angiograms that enhances the
vessels. We propose an improved vessel enhancement method specifically designed for this application. It keeps
the advantages of Hessian-based extraction methods (speed, robustness, multiscale) while bypassing its more
important limitations: the blurring of bifurcations, and the incomplete filling of very large vessels.
The major contributions of this paper are twofold. First, the classical centered kernel used in Hessian-based
methods is substituted with an elongated off-centered kernel. The new filter detects the different orientations
involved at a bifurcation: it can answer properly to 'half vessels' beginning at the considered pixel (as opposed
to the centered classical filter). The proposed "semi-oriented ridge" filter is also more robust to noise, and it
stays multi-scale and quickly computable.
Second, an original bifurcation detection and enhancement method is presented, based on the following heuristics:
"bifurcations have three vessels (at least) in their immediate neighborhood". More precisely, the semi-oriented
ridges answers in each tested orientation θ∈]-π,π] are stored in a circular histogram. The proposed bifurcation
energy is the height of the third peak in this histogram: it will have a significant value at bifurcations only.
The performance of the complete framework is demonstrated both on the produced vessel maps and on the final
modeling results.
A fully automated 3D centerline modeling algorithm for coronary arteries is presented. It utilizes a subset of standard rotational X-Ray angiography projections that correspond to a single cardiac phase. The projection selection is based on a simultaneously recorded electrocardiogram (ECG). The algorithm utilizes a region growing approach, which selects voxels in 3D space that most probably belong to the vascular structure. The local growing speed is controlled by a 3D response computation algorithm. This algorithm calculates a measure for the probability of a point in 3D to belong to a vessel or not.
Centerlines of all detected vessels are extracted from the 3D representation built during the region growing and linked in a hierarchical manner. The centerlines representing the most significant vessels are selected by a geometry-based weighting criterion.
The theoretically achievable accuracy of the algorithm is evaluated on simulated projections of a virtual heart phantom. It is capable of extracting coronary centerlines with an accuracy that is mainly limited by projection and volume quantization (0.25 mm). The algorithm needs at least 3 projections for modeling, while in the phantom study, 5 projections are sufficient to achieve the best possible accuracy. It is shown that the algorithm is reasonably insensitive to residual motion, which means that it is able to cope with inconsistencies within the projection data set caused by finite gating accuracy, respiration or irregular heart beats. Its practical feasibility is demonstrated on clinical cases showing automatically generated models of left and right coronary arteries (LCA/RCA).
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