Vessel enhancing diffusionA scale space representation of vessel structures

R MANNIESING, M VIERGEVER, W NIESSEN
2006 Medical Image Analysis  
A method is proposed to enhance vascular structures within the framework of scale space theory. We combine a smooth vessel filter which is based on a geometrical analysis of the Hessian's eigensystem, with a nonlinear anisotropic diffusion scheme. The amount and orientation of diffusion depend on the local vessel likeliness. Vessel enhancing diffusion (VED) is applied to patient and phantom data and compared to linear, regularized Perona-Malik, edge and coherence enhancing diffusion. The method
more » ... performs better than most of the existing techniques in visualizing vessels with varying radii and in enhancing vessel appearance. A diameter study on phantom data shows that VED least affects the accuracy of diameter measurements. It is shown that using VED as a preprocessing step improves level set based segmentation of the cerebral vasculature, in particular segmentation of the smaller vessels of the vasculature.
doi:10.1016/j.media.2006.06.003 pmid:16876462 fatcat:b2owylavizfjrljs227xuqknxi