Extraction of coronary arteries by using a sequence of x-ray angiographic images

Abstract

A method was developed for extraction coronary arteries from a contiguous sequence of angiographic images. Since coronary artery in the image usually has poor local contrast and has ribs, spine, and other tissues in the background. We remove the background using the information of temporal continuity. A set of multi-size matched filters process to enhance vessels from poor local contrast. The wavelet transformation based method is then employed to remove noise to enhance the image quality. We also design a stencil mask to remove the stationary tissues further.