Extraction of coronary vessels in fluoroscopic X-ray sequences using vessel correspondence optimization

Abstract

We present a method to extract coronary vessels from fluoroscopic x-ray sequences. Given the vessel structure for the source frame,vessel correspondence candidates in the subsequent frame are generated by a novel hierarchical search scheme to overcome the aperture problem. Optimal correspondences are determined within a Markov random field optimization framework. Post-processing is performed to extract vessel branches newly visible due to the inflow of contrast agent. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation conducted on a dataset of 18 sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.