Shape preserving filament enhancement filtering

Abstract

Morphological connected set filters for extraction of filamentous details from medical images are developed. The advantages of these filters are that they are shape preserving and do not amplify noise. Two approaches are compared: (i) multi-scale filtering (ii) single-step shape filtering using connected set (or attribute) thinnings. The latter method highlights all filamentous structure in a single filtering stage, regardless of the scale. The second approach is an order of magnitude faster than the first, filtering a 2563 volume in 41.65 s on a 400 MHz Pentium II.