A review of coronary vessel segmentation algorithms

Abstract

Coronary heart disease has been one of the main threats to human health. Coronary angiography is taken as the gold standard; for the assessment of coronary artery disease. However, sometimes, the images are difficult to visually interpret because of the crossing and overlapping of vessels in the angiogram. Vessel extraction from X-ray angiograms has been a challenging problem for several years. There are several problems in the extraction of vessels, including: weak contrast between the coronary arteries and the background, unknown and easily deformable shape of the vessel tree, and strong overlapping shadows of the bones. In this article we investigate the coronary vessel extraction and enhancement techniques, and present capabilities of the most important algorithms concerning coronary vessel segmentation.

Comparison of vessel enhancement algorithms applied to time‐of‐flight MRA images for cerebrovascular segmentation

“…For synthetic images and MRA images of healthy subjects, vessels with a radius size less or equal than 0.5 mm are usually segmented less accurately than vessels with a larger radius size. Small vessels present lower contrast than large ones due to a reduced presence of blood and contrast agent, as noted by Dehkordi et al 28 As a consequence, small vessels are harder to segment and some of them may be lost during the process. The smoothing applied in most vessel enhancement filters may also contribute to this finding.…”

Reduction of Visual Disruptions in Coronary Cine-Angiography for Better Diagnostic Viewing

“…The noise associated with the images is also increased during the traditional enhancement techniques, which are based on unsharp masking. Tu and his team have published a non-linear model for enhancing the angiography image details without having such negative effects and that suggested model was known as stick-guided lateral inhibition [6]. This proposed model simulates the enhancing mechanisms integrated in the eyes of human beings and of many animals and its implementation is based on asymmetric sticks [16].…”

“…Moreover, this uniformly illuminated frame has been normalized by using (6) to obtain a better contrast among the vessel structures [14].…”

“…Non-uniform illumination, poor contrast, noise and motion are reported as the visual degradation factors that occur during the angiogram procedure [5] [6] [7]. Non-uniform illumination in CCAs visualizes an individual vessel breaking into several segments.…”

“…Further, inadequate mixing of contrast material and blood could be seen as a luminal irregularity. It occurs when there is a strong presence of blood and contrast agents in the vessels, the thick vessels have more contrast to noise ratios than the small narrow ones [1] [6]. Fig.…”