Multi-scale model-based vessel enhancement using local line integrals

This paper presents a novel vessel enhancement method. By regarding a vessel segment as a local line and exploiting the second order information along the line, our method embeds a vessel model to capture vessel structures. The vessel model is the key to better performances of our method than the Hessian-based methods and makes the Hessian-based methods fall in an extreme case of our method. It is experimentally shown that our method gives more accurate “vesselness” measures and vessel direction estimations. In particular, our method achieves better background suppression, smoother “vesselness” measures inside vessels and better responses at crossings (where two relatively straight vessels meet).