Fast 3D tracking and quantization of small vascular structures in 3D medical images

This paper introduces an approach for fast tracking, quantization and centreline extraction of small vascular structures in medical imaging, with the problem of coronary segmentation used as an example. The tracking is achieved by propagating an explicit surface. This surface is represented as a triangular adaptive mesh where the element size is adjusted based on the current size of the vessel. Adaptive re-meshing is performed on-the-fly during propagation in an efficient manner. An effective self-intersection prevention method is introduced to address one of the major issues in triangular mesh offsetting.