3D interactive coronary artery segmentation using random forests and Markov random field optimization

Coronary artery segmentation plays a vital important role in coronary disease diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we present a machine learning based interactive coronary artery segmentation method for 3D computed tomography angiography images. We first apply vessel diffusion to reduce noise interference and enhance the tubular structures in the images. A few user strokes are required to specify region of interest and background. Various image features for detecting the coronary arteries are then extracted in a multi-scale fashion, and are fed into a random forests classifier, which assigns each voxel with probability values of being coronary artery and background. The final segmentation is carried through an MRF based optimization using primal dual algorithm. A connectivity component analysis is carried out as post processing to remove isolated, small regions to produce the segmented coronary arterial vessels. The proposed method requires limited user interference and achieves robust segmentation results.