2D and 3D vascular structures enhancement via improved vesselness filter and vessel enhancing diffusion

In medical imaging practice, vascular enhancement filtering has been widely performed before vessel segmentation and centerline detection, which provides important pathological information and holds great significance for vessel quantification. In the literature, numerous well known vesselness filtering approaches have been developed. For example, some techniques explore the Hessian matrix of the original images and construct the vessel filter based on the eigenvalues of the Hessian matrix. In this work we develop a hybrid technique for fast and accurate vascular enhancement filter, which contains two main steps: Vesselness diffusion and improved vesselness filter based on the eigenvalues ratio. This novel approach is quantitatively and qualitatively tested on the public 2D retinal datasets and 3D synthetic vascular structure models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed filter outperforms other existing approaches for curvilinear structure enhancement from noisy images. Moreover, the novel approach is further evaluated on real patient Coronary Computed Tomography Angiography (CCTA) datasets with ground truth regions labelled by professional cardiologist. Our method is proven to produce more accurate coronary artery segmentation results. Given the accuracy and efficiency, the proposed vesselness filter can be further used in medical practice for vascular structures enhancement before vessel segmentation and quantification.