Vessel segmentation for angiographic enhancement and analysis

Abstract

Angiography is a widely used method of vessel imaging for the diagnosis and treatment of pathological manifestations as well as for medical research. Vessel segmentation in angiograms is useful for analysis but also as a means to enhance the vessels. Often the vessel surface has to be quantified to evaluate the success of certain drugs treatment (e.g. aimed at angiogenesis in the case of transplanted skin) or to gain insight into different pathological manifestations (e.g. proliferative diabetic retinopathy). In this paper we describe algorithms for automatic vessel segmentation in angiograms. We first enhance likely vessel regions to obtain a vessel map which is then segmented. To remove false positives we accept in a second step only those regions showing branchings and bifurcations which are typical for a vessel tree.