Coronary vein tracking from MSCT using a minimum cost path approach

Abstract

In this paper, we deal with the problem of tracking the coronary venous tree from Multi-Slice Computed Tomography (MSCT) angiography. Contrast inhomogeneities are a major issue. The proposed tracking procedure is based on minimum-cost path computation and makes use of ‘Fast-Marching’ technique. The algorithm aims at propagating a front inside a vascular structure and extracting a centered path. To achieve this goal, a specific cost function which combines the vessel local orientation to a vesselness measure is designed. Experiments on synthetic data and real data have been performed. Coronary veins with contrast difficulties are extracted with a low computing time.