Fig 1.
System workflow.
Fig 2.
Left: Sphere model for vessel. The foreground is computed inside of sphere s and the background is computed using the data in ΔI and outside of tube. Right: vessel in a 3-D voxel window without enforced noise.
Fig 3.
A vessel in a 3-D voxel window with directional constraint.
Fig 4.
Noisy image makes a vessel appears to be disconnected.
Fig 5.
Discontinuity in LAD (left anterior descending) artery shown.
(e) is a magnified version of (d).
Fig 6.
Active search for vessel candidate.
Type 1 and 2 active search methods are illustrated. Type 1 is used for disconnected vessel and type 2 is used for disconnected branches.
Fig 7.
Example of tracked centerlines and actively searched region.
Actively searched regions are marked in blue circles. Note there are many false positive seed points (white and yellow spheres). They are automatically deleted later.
Table 1.
Dataset used for Poisson parameter estimation.
Poisson pdf () trained on LM (left main) artery length.
Fig 8.
Planar vesselness (red) vs. conventional 3-D Frangi’s Vesselness (blue) along the vessel centerline.
Both have high values along the tracked vessel. And they are much correlated at proximal and mid-part of coronary artery. When there is no vessel, both values are near zero.
Fig 9.
Exhaustive search for initial direction of vessel using cylinder model.
Table 2.
Test result using 8 Rotterdam Training dataset.
It shows detailed values for each vessel. (sc: score.).
Table 3.
Average overlap per Test dataset.
Table 4.
Standard deviation and p-values for all parameters OV, OF, OT (Table 3).
Table 5.
Average accuracy per Test dataset.
Table 6.
Summary for Test dataset.
Fig 10.
Examples of coronary artery structure found by the proposed method.
Fig 11.
Example of centerline extracted (left) and coronary artery tree mesh reconstruction (right) found by the proposed method.
Table 7.
Overlap Measure Scores for all the methods using Test dataset.
Also accuracy distance measure is shown in mm. Last column is marked with a circle for the similar experiment to us.