Coronary vessel extraction method using an improved minimum path based region growing

We have proposed a minimum path based method to extract 3-D coronary vessels, named minimum path based region growing (MP-RG). The MP-RG approach is based on the high convexity of vascular profiles, and is rather inefficient in discriminating vessel structures and other high-contrast structures. In this paper, orientated profile symmetry information is combined with profile convexity information in building the potential function for minimum path propagation, and an improved MP-RG approach for vessel extraction is thus developed. Experiment results validate the improved performance of the improved MP-RG method.