SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CORONARY SEGMENTATION AND VISUALIZATION
First Claim
1. A method of coronary vessel segmentation and visualization, comprising the steps of:
- providing a digitized coronary image, said image comprising a plurality of intensities associated with a 3-dimensional grid of voxels;
placing a plurality of seed points along an estimated centerline of a coronary vessel;
selecting a seed point and constructing a cyclic graph around said seed point in a plane perpendicular to the centerline at the seed point;
performing a multi-scale-mean shift filtering in said perpendicular plane to estimate image gradient values;
detecting a boundary of said vessel using a minimum-mean-cycle optimization that minimizes a ratio of a cost of a cycle in said graph to a length of said cycle;
constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary about a point on said centerline; and
refining the location of said centerline point from said sub-voxel accurate boundary, wherein said steps of constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary and refining the centerline point location are repeated until convergence.
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Abstract
A method of coronary vessel segmentation and visualization includes providing a digitized coronary image, placing a plurality of seed points along an estimated centerline of a coronary vessel, selecting a seed point and constructing a cyclic graph around the seed point in a plane perpendicular to the centerline at the seed point, performing a multi-scale-mean shift filtering in the perpendicular plane to estimate image gradient values, detecting a vessel boundary using a minimum-mean-cycle optimization that minimizes a ratio of a cost of a cycle to a length of a cycle, constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary about a point on the centerline, and refining the location of the centerline point from the sub-voxel accurate boundary, where the steps of constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary and refining the centerline point location are repeated until convergence.
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Citations
32 Claims
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1. A method of coronary vessel segmentation and visualization, comprising the steps of:
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providing a digitized coronary image, said image comprising a plurality of intensities associated with a 3-dimensional grid of voxels; placing a plurality of seed points along an estimated centerline of a coronary vessel; selecting a seed point and constructing a cyclic graph around said seed point in a plane perpendicular to the centerline at the seed point; performing a multi-scale-mean shift filtering in said perpendicular plane to estimate image gradient values; detecting a boundary of said vessel using a minimum-mean-cycle optimization that minimizes a ratio of a cost of a cycle in said graph to a length of said cycle; constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary about a point on said centerline; and refining the location of said centerline point from said sub-voxel accurate boundary, wherein said steps of constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary and refining the centerline point location are repeated until convergence. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)
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14. A method of coronary vessel segmentation and visualization, comprising the steps of:
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providing a digitized coronary image, said image comprising a plurality of intensities associated with a 3-dimensional grid of voxels; constructing a plurality of vessel boundaries about seed points along an estimated centerline of a coronary vessel; constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundaries from said vessel boundaries; refining the location of said centerline point from said sub-voxel accurate boundary, wherein said steps of constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary and refining the centerline point location are repeated until convergence; constructing a 3-dimensional triangulated surface model from said sub-voxel accurate vessel boundaries to form a tubular mesh representing said coronary vessel; specifying a less-than Z-buffer for said tubular mesh wherein every visible point in the resulting Z-buffer specifies the distance, along a viewing direction, from a viewer to a nearest visible part of the tubular mesh; generating a set of two-dimensional points by extracting all Z-buffer points that are on a boundary between visible and non-visible parts of the tubular mesh; generating a triangular mesh from said set of two-dimensional points; projecting the triangular mesh into a 3-dimensional space by adding to each point of said mesh a Z coordinate calculated from a corresponding less-than Z-buffer function value and a known model-view transformation of the specific viewing direction; and creating a complete Z-buffer representation of the projected 3-dimensional triangular mesh representing said vessels by adding near-plane Z-buffer values of the projected 3-dimensional triangular mesh to corresponding non-visible points of the less-than Z-buffer function. - View Dependent Claims (15, 16, 17, 18, 19)
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20. A program storage device readable by a computer, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the computer to perform the method steps for coronary vessel segmentation and visualization, said method comprising the steps of:
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providing a digitized coronary image, said image comprising a plurality of intensities associated with a 3-dimensional grid of voxels; placing a plurality of seed points along an estimated centerline of a coronary vessel; selecting a seed point and constructing a cyclic graph around said seed point in a plane perpendicular to the centerline at the seed point; performing a multi-scale-mean shift filtering in said perpendicular plane to estimate image gradient values; detecting a boundary of said vessel using a minimum-mean-cycle optimization that minimizes a ratio of a cost of a cycle in said graph to a length of said cycle; constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary about a point on said centerline; and refining the location of said centerline point from said sub-voxel accurate boundary, wherein said steps of constructing a sub-voxel accurate vessel boundary and refining the centerline point location are repeated until convergence. - View Dependent Claims (21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32)
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Specification