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A monocentric centerline extraction method for ring-like blood vessels

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Abstract

Centerline is generally used to measure topological and morphological parameters of blood vessels, which is pivotal for the quantitative analysis of vascular diseases. However, previous centerline extraction methods have two drawbacks on complex blood vessels, represented as the failure on ring-like structures and the existing of multi-voxel width. In this paper, we propose a monocentric centerline extraction method for ring-like blood vessels, which consists of three components. First, multiple centerlines are generated from the seed points that are chosen by randomly sprinkling points on blood vessel data. Second, multi-centerline fusion is used to repair the notches of centerlines on ring-like vessels, and the local maximum of distance from oundary is employed to remedy the missing centerline points. Finally, monocentric processing is devised to keep the vascular centerline with single voxel width. We compared the proposed method with Wan et al.’s method and topological thinning on five groups of data including synthesized vascular datasets and MR brain images. The result showed the proposed method performed better than the two contrast methods both by visual inspection and by quantitative assessment, which demonstrated the performance of the proposed method on ring-like blood vessels as well as the elimination of multi-voxel width points.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61601363, 61372046, 61401264, 11571012, 61640418, 81530058, and 61601154; the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant No. 2016YFC1300300; the Science and Technology Plan Program in Shaanxi Province of China under Grant Nos. 2013K12-20-12 and 2015KW-002; the Natural Science Research Plan Program in Shaanxi Province of China under Grant Nos. 2017JQ6017, 2015JM6322, and 2015JZ019; and the Scientific Research Foundation of Northwest University. The MR brain images from healthy volunteers used in this paper were collected and made available by the CASILab at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and were distributed by the MIDAS Data Server at Kitware, Inc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Sciences and Technology, Northwest University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710069, China

    Fengjun Zhao, Feifei Sun, Yuqing Hou, Yanrong Chen, Xin Cao, Huangjian Yi, Bin Wang & Xiaowei He

  2. College of Life Information Science and Instrument Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310018, China

    Dongmei Chen

  3. Engineering Research Center of Molecular and Neuro Imaging of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710071, China

    Jimin Liang

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  1. Fengjun Zhao
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Correspondence to Xiaowei He or Jimin Liang.

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All the MR brain data are obtained from public database. No human/animal experiments are involved in this paper.

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Zhao, F., Sun, F., Hou, Y. et al. A monocentric centerline extraction method for ring-like blood vessels. Med Biol Eng Comput 56, 695–707 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-017-1717-8

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