Robust coronary artery tracking from fluoroscopic image sequences

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to temporally track the principal coronary arteries in an X-ray fluoroscopy setting. First, the principal coronary artery centerlines are extracted at a first time instant. Secondly, in order to estimate the centerline coordinates in subsequent time frames, a pyramidal Lucas-Kanade optical flow approach is used. Finally, an active contour model coupled with a gradient vector flow (GVF) formulation is used to deform the estimated centerline coordinates towards the actual medial axis positions. The algorithm's effectiveness has been evaluated on 38 monoplane images from three patients and the temporal tracking lasted over one cardiac cycle. The results show that the centerlines were correctly tracked in 92% of the image frames. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.