Vessel region detection in coronary X-ray angiograms

Abstract

X-ray angiography is a standard method for diagnosing coronary artery diseases. In order to show coronary arteries, contrast agent and X-ray imaging are used but the produced images are not always of adequate quality for visual examination. The low quality is caused by different artifacts. The presence of catheter and also the surrounding tissues make the processing of these images more difficult. In this paper, we propose a fully automated method to enhance the angiogram images and detect the arteries. Our proposed method contains three main steps which are Hessian filter enhancement, feature extraction and vessel region detection. To further enhance the visual quality of the image, non-vessel areas are blurred. The enhanced images can be utilized for better diagnosis of coronary diseases such as stenosis. Subjective evaluation of the enhanced images shows the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method.