Extraction and analysis of coronary tree from single x-ray angiographies
Hildegard Koehler, Michel Couprie, Sahla Bouattour, Dietrich W. R. Paulus · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
Coronary vessel abnormalities can lead to insufficient blood circulation in the heart muscle. One way to control and detect distributions of this supply is the continuous observation of the vessel structure of the patient over a certain time. In this paper we propose a reliable method for extracting the main vessels and most notably also fine ramifications in noisy angiographies with uneven background. We structured the extracted centerlines in a graph, obtaining thus information about the depth of branching-out and the number of visible vessels in the coronary-tree. These quantitative measurements serve as indicators to categorize the state of recovery of the patient and can be compared to earlier or later disease-stages. We evaluated our methods by comparing the results with hand-segmented images.