A GRAY-LEVEL THINNING METHOD FOR DELINEATION AND REPRESENTATION OF ARTERIES

The quantification of three dimensional (3D) properties of coronary ar teries is of significant importance. The performance of the 3D analysi s is critically based on low-level representation of the arterial tree for different projections. A skeletal representation of arteries can provide appropriate data structure for registration of multiple angiog raphic projections and it can be further utilized for 3D reconstructio n of the arterial tree. This paper presents an automated method for ex tracting the skeletal points of an arterial tree directly from the gra y-level information without determining the edges a priori. It offers the advantage of improved reliability compared to methods based on det ecting dual edges of the arteries. Novel application of filtering tech niques provide accurate estimates of the statistics of the background. A recursive search scheme is used to aggregate the skeletal represent ation at multiple resolutions. Results on a set of Digitally Subtracte d Angiograms (DSA) have been presented.