SEMI-AUTOMATIC CORONARY ARTERY CENTERLINE EXTRACTION IN COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY ANGIOGRAPHY DATA

This paper presents a semi-automatic coronary centerline extraction algorithm for computed tomography angiography data. The method applies region growing to computed tomography angiography data and incorporates bifurcation and leak detection. The presented method is evaluated either on the original data and on data in which vessel-like structures have been enhanced. Semi-automatically extracted centerlines of the three main coronary arteries are compared with centerlines manually annotated by three observers, using an overlap and distance measure. The method successfully extracted vessel centerlines in up to 15 out of 18 evaluated cases, with a localization accuracy which was in the range of the interobserver variability. Vessel enhancement prior to centerline extraction did not improve the results