Automatic artery skeleton extraction

A new approach to the problem of extracting the skeletons of arteries in angiograms is proposed. The peaks, ridges and saddles of the digitized angiogram are considered as candidate artery skeleton points and are determined by analyzing the first and second order partial derivatives of the angiogram. Next, the binary image of candidate skeleton points is constructed and thinned. The large number of short linear branches, due to noise and irrelevant anatomical structures, are eliminated through connected component labeling of skeleton curves and pruning. Experimental results on digitized angiograms are presented