Coronary arterial tree extraction based on artery tracking and mathematical morphology

An algorithm for the unsupervised extraction of the coronary arterial tree in single-view angiograms is proposed. Its output is a structural description of the coronary arterial tree (skeleton and borders) along with accurate information for the coronary artery dimensions. The method consists of two stages. (i) Arterial tree detection, where the approximate centerline and borders of the coronary arterial tree are extracted through a recursive artery tracking method based on circular template analysis for the local artery border detection. (ii) Artery skeleton and border estimation, where the accurate skeleton and borders of each artery segment of the arterial tree are computed based on the morphological tools of homotopy modification and watershed transform. Specifically, the approximate centerline and borders of each artery segment computed at the first stage are used for constructing its enclosing area where the defined skeleton and border curves are considered as markers. Experimental results using digitized coronary angiograms are presented