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Vessel tracking by connecting the dots

szymczak, andrzej
Colorado School of Mines
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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10380/1406
New: Prefer using the following doi: https://doi.org/10.54294/80hw6q
Published in The MIDAS Journal - MICCAI 2008 Workshop: Grand Challenge Coronary Artery Tracking.
Submitted by Andrzej Szymczak on 2008-07-06T05:10:39Z.

We propose an algorithm for tracking blood vessel segments in Computed Tomographic (CT) images. Our procedure first finds core points that tend to concentrate along the centerlines of vessels. Intuitively, the core points are centers of intensity plateaus in two-dimensional slices through the input image. The starting and the end point of the desired vessel (S and E) are also considered core points. The weighted core graph is built by connecting nearby core points with edges. Edge weights are designed so that edges of large weights are unlikely to follow a vessel segment. We compute the shortest path connecting S and E in the core graph. The output is the result of applying shortcutting operations to this path.