Segmentation of Coronary Vessels by Combining the Detection of Centerlines and Active Contour Model

In this paper we present an automated method for segmentation of coronary vessels in X-ray angiogram images. Firstly the angiograms are registered to omit the artifacts as much as possible. Secondly geometric active contours are used as a powerful tool of segmentation. To facilitate convergence of active contours, the centerlines of the vessels are detected by a tracking method. By this procedure even very thin and low contrast vessels are also detected successfully. The results show the superiority of proposed algorithm over those in literature.