Automatic detection of the coronary arterial contours with sub-branches from an X-ray angiogram

Describes a method to trace the coronary arterial boundaries with branches automatically from X-ray angiograms. The edge points are fixed by a function based on smoothing differential operator for the gray values on the searching line defined from the edge points fixed previously. Thus the boundary points along the artery are detected automatically. The branch positions are detected automatically and the branch of the artery is searched by the same algorithm. In the edge detection process, the required user interaction is only the manual pointing of the initial data such as the starting point the direction and the range for search. This method is tested and verified its usefulness through computer generated images with different stenoses and actual angiograms