Segmentation of Coronary Artery on Angiogram by Combined Morphological Operations and Watershed

Abstract

In this paper, a scheme using fuzzy mathematical morphology operations is proposed for extracting coronary ar- teries tree on angiogram. After the enhancement of image with the traditional morphological top-hat operator, the vessel image is filtered with the fuzzy morphological opening with a set of linear structuring elements at different orientation. At the same time, the enhanced image is also filtered with the dual of fuzzy opening with the same structuring elements set. The two filtered vessel image is then combined into a new image considering the local orientation consistency, detected by the morphological filter, within a linear neighborhood of each location. Threshold of the result image produces the binary vessel structure which is separate from background structure. The extracted vessel structure is lastly treated as prior of shape and location of vessel and used as marker in morphological watershed for detecting the accurate vessel boundaries. Experimentation shows the performance of proposed method on extraction vascular tree on clinical angiogram under x-ray. I. INTRODUCTION