A new method of vessel centerline extraction from 3D CT coronary angiography based on open-snake

Efficiently obtaining a reliable coronary artery centerline from computed tomography coronary angiography (CTCA) data is relevant in clinical practice. In this paper, open-snake is presented to extract the vessel centerline, which is drove by two external forces, one is Gradient Vector Flow (GVF), and the other one is an adaptive stretching force acted on the two ends of open-snake. To make the open-snake working effectively in the CTCA data, the following steps are used to pre-process, initialize and control the deforming process. Firstly, the multi-scale filter is used to enhance vessels of the CTCA data, based on which ridge-point tracking is implemented to initialize the open-snake. When the stretching force is acted on the two ends, the open-snake is adaptively deforming along the vessel´s ridge-lines. The process is stopped until the deforming curves are not changed any longer. As a semi-automated method, the open-snake can evolve along the centerline of the vessel with little user interaction. In the experiments, standardized evaluation methodology is used to measure the extraction effects of coronary artery centerline. The results indicate that our method can extract most of the coronary artery centerlines with a good performance.