Biomedical Research

Vessel segmentation in X-Ray Coronary Angiography (XCA) images, which is used for the diagnosis and treatment of anomalies in coronary vessels, has been an intriguing topic in recent years. Due to dynamic background and ambiguous brightness distribution, success rate in segmentation is low and realization has been a challenging process. This paper presents a new approach to increase the success rate of segmentation in XCA images. For this purpose, the vessel structure position is first determined with foreground detection algorithm in the XCA image sequences. Next, state of the art methods of vessel identification and image thresholding used for vessel structure segmentation are being experimented in full and foreground images. The contribution of the suggested method to the success of the segmentation is revealed with the experiments carried out. The scales of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy are given in the paper to evaluate the success of the segmentation. The results were compared with the angiography images segmented manually by a specialist physician. Without proposed detection of candidate vessel location, highest accuracy results 92.4 is achieved with Multiscale Gabor filter and PTile thresholding. Frangi Filter and Otsu thresholding algorithm reached the highest success rate of 93.81 by using the proposed method. All the experiments have shown that accuracy of vessel segmentation is increase by the proposed approach.

Author(s): Mehmet Emin Tenekeci, Huseyin Pehlivan, Yasin Kaya
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