Accurate quantification of small-diameter tubular structures in isotropic CT volume data based on multiscale line filter responses

Abstract

A method fully utilizing multiscale line filter responses is presented to estimate the point spread function (PSF) of a CT scanner and diameters of small tubular structures based on the PSF. The estimation problem is formulated as a least square fitting of a sequence of multiscale responses obtained at each medial axis point to the precomputed multiscale response curve for the ideal line model. The method was validated through phantom experiments and demonstrated to accurately measure small-diameter structures which are significantly overestimated by conventional methods based on the full width half maximum (FWHM) and zero-crossing edge detection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.