Live-vessel: Extending livewire for simultaneous extraction of optimal medial and boundary paths in vascular images

Abstract

This paper incorporates multiscale vesselness filtering into the Livewire framework to simultaneously compute optimal medial axes and boundaries in vascular images. To this end, we extend the existing 2D graph search to 3D space to optimize not only for spatial variables (x, y), but also for radius values r at each node. In addition, we minimize change for both scale and the smallest principle curvature and incorporate vessel boundary evidence in our optimization. When compared to two sets of DRIVE expert manual tracings, our proposed technique reduced the overall segmentation task time by 68.2%, had a similarity ratio of 0.772 (0.775 between manual), and was 98.2% reproducible. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.