Recursive Tracking Of Vascular Trees In Angiograms Using A Detection-deletion Scheme
A computer algorithm was developed to automatically identify the vascular tree in an angiogram. This was accomplished by recursively implementing a vessel tracking and a branch-point detection algorithm. To successfully segment overlapped vessels and to prevent reentry of the tracking path, a detection-deletion scheme was employed. Once a vessel segment was identified, it was filled with the background pixel values and thus deleted from the angiogram. It was demonstrated that the algorithm provides satisfactory segmentations of vascular trees in both digital subtraction angiograms and unprocessed angiograms.