Extraction of Coronary Vessels in Fluoroscopic X-Ray Sequences Using Vessel Correspondence Optimization
This addresses the challenge of tracking coronary vessels in medical imaging for healthcare applications, representing an incremental improvement with a novel hierarchical search scheme.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting coronary vessels from fluoroscopic x-ray sequences by optimizing vessel correspondences across frames, achieving effectiveness demonstrated through quantitative and qualitative evaluation on a dataset of 18 sequences.
We present a method to extract coronary vessels from fluoroscopic x-ray sequences. Given the vessel structure for the source frame, vessel correspondence candidates in the subsequent frame are generated by a novel hierarchical search scheme to overcome the aperture problem. Optimal correspondences are determined within a Markov random field optimization framework. Post-processing is performed to extract vessel branches newly visible due to the inflow of contrast agent. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation conducted on a dataset of 18 sequences demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.