In this article, we propose an automatic algorithm for coronary artery segmentation from 3D X-ray data sequences of a cardiac cycle (3D-CT scan, 64 detectors, 10 phases). This method is based on recent mathematical morphology techniques (some of them being extended in this article). It is also guided by anatomical knowledge, using discrete geometric tools to fit on the artery shape independently from any perturbation of the data. The application of the method on a validation dataset (60 images: 20 patients in 3 phases) led to 90% correct (and automatically obtained) segmentations, the 10% remaining cases corresponding to images where the SNR was very low.
In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm for coronary artery extraction from X-ray data (3D-CT scan, 64 detectors) based on the mathematical morphology techniques and guided by anatomical knowledge. Growing and thresholding methods, in their most general form, are not sufficient to extract only the whole coronary arteries, because of the properties of these images. Finding appropriate methods is known to be a challenging problem because of the data imperfections such as noise, heterogeneous intensity and contrasts of similar tissues. We deal with these challenges by employing discrete geometric tools to fit on the arteries form independently from any perturbation of the data.
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