Vascular centerline extraction of CTA images based on minimal path and Bayesian tracking
Fan Zhang, Pei Lü, Xiaoyun Liu, Shoujun Zhou · 2017
Vascular centerline and centerline branch information are especially important for the analysis of vascular disease and vascular intervention surgery. Minimal path propagation with backtracking algorithm (MPP-BT) has a good performance of vascular centerline extraction, and solves endpoint problem, shortcut problem and accumulation problem of traditional minimum path algorithm. Given a path through two endpoints, the MPP-BT is used in this paper to extract vascular centerline by manually setting a starting point; however, the resultant centerline lacks branch information. To obtain centerline branch information, a new method is proposed, which is based on minimum path and Bayesian tracking. The process includes three steps: Firstly, a new multiscale filtering algorithm is used to enhance vascular structure; secondly, vascular centerlines are extracted using minimum path; finally, quantized information of centerline and branch structure is obtained by Bayesian tracking. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively extract vascular centerline with the corresponding branch information.