A review of coronary vessel segmentation algorithms

Coronary heart disease has been one of the main threats of human health. Coronary angiography is taken as the “gold standard” for the assessment of coronary artery disease. But sometimes, the images are difficult to interpret visually because of the crossing and overlapping of the vessels in the angiograms. Vessel extraction from X-ray angiograms has been a challenging problem for several years. There are several problems for extraction of vessels: weak contrast between the coronary arteries and the background, unknown and easily deformable shape of the vessel tree, sometimes overlapping strong shadows of bones and so on. In this paper we investigate coronary vessel extraction and enhancement techniques and algorithms, and present capabilities of the most important algorithms concerning coronary vessel segmentation.