Semi-automatic segmentation of coronary vessels based on improved livewire algorithm

Semi-automatic segmentation of coronary vessels in Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) images is more practical than fully automatic segmentation. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to extract coronary vessels semi-automatically. This algorithm is a combination of the traditional livewire algorithm and the gradient vector flow-Frangi (GVF-Frangi) filter. Results showed that the proposed approach is more robust and effective in the semi-automatic segmentation of coronary vessels than the traditional livewire algorithm.