Vessel filtering and segmentation of coronary CT angiographic images

Purpose Coronary artery segmentation in coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA) images plays a crucial role in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases. However, due to the complexity of coronary CTA images and coronary structure, it is difficult to automatically segment coronary arteries accurately and efficiently from numerous coronary CTA images. Method In this study, an automatic method based on symmetrical radiation filter (SRF) and D-means is presented. The SRF, which is applied to the three orthogonal planes, is designed to filter the suspicious vessel tissue according to the features of gradient changes on vascular boundaries to segment coronary arteries accurately and reduce computational cost. Additionally, the D-means local clustering is proposed to be embedded into vessel segmentation to eliminate noise impact in coronary CTA images. Results The results of the proposed method were compared against the manual delineations in 210 coronary CTA data sets. The average values of true positive, false positive, Jaccard measure, and Dice coefficient were 0.9541± 0.0651 , 0.0812± 0.1024 , 0.8894± 0.1214 , and 0.9318± 0.0833 , respectively. Moreover, comparing the delineated data sets and public data sets showed that the proposed method is better than the related methods. Conclusion The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can perform complete, robust, and accurate segmentation of coronary arteries with low computational cost. Therefore, the proposed method is proven effective in vessel segmentation of coronary CTA images without extensive training data and can meet clinical applications.