Segmentation and tracking of coronary arteries

In most developed countries, heart disease is the leading cause of death. As a result of plaque buildup, the heart´s beating motion is disrupted. A two-step method is proposed to detect this pathologic behavior. First, vessel skeletons are extracted in each image by detecting regions of low gradient magnitude. Then, a motion trajectory is computed for each point of the segmented artery tree. The output is a set of vectors describing the general motion of each artery branch