Level set method for pulmonary vessels extraction

Pulmonary vessels extraction is of utmost importance in medical study. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to extract pulmonary vessels in CT images based on the level set method. A new region based speed function is designed and integrated with the previous edge based terms to evolve the front. Due to this region based speed term, the front could propagate even in thin vessel branches. The level set evolution is performed on a multiscale space where a new solution passing method is proposed that could induce a fast convergence rate. Meanwhile, an improved Hermes algorithm, we call it fast Hermes, is developed to evolve the level set evolution numerically. Experiments show that the segmentation results using our approach, especially in thin vessel branches extraction, are more promising than that of the usual level set method for segmentation.