Robust catheter identification and tracking in X-ray angiographic sequences

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the major causes of death worldwide. Today X-ray angiography is a standard method for CAD diagnosis. Usually, the quality of these images is not good enough. Noise, camera and heart motions, non-uniform illumination and even the presence of catheter are sources of quality degradation. The existence of catheter can produce difficulties in vessel extraction methods because catheter is structurally similar to arteries. In this paper we propose a fully automatic method for catheter detection and tracking during the whole angiography sequence. In this method with a vesselness map, we smooth each frame using guided filter. The catheter is detected in the first frame using Hough transform. We then fit a second order polynomial on the catheter and accurately track it throughout the sequence. Our method is tested on 25 X-ray angiography sequences where a precision of 0.9597 is achieved.