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3D vessel extraction using a scale-adaptive hybrid parametric tracker

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Abstract

3D vessel extraction has great significance in the diagnosis of vascular diseases. However, accurate extraction of vessels from computed tomography angiography (CTA) data is challenging. For one thing, vessels in different body parts have a wide range of scales and large curvatures; for another, the intensity distributions of vessels in different CTA data vary considerably. Besides, surrounding interfering tissue, like bones or veins with similar intensity, also seriously affects vessel extraction. Considering all the above imaging and structural features of vessels, we propose a new scale-adaptive hybrid parametric tracker (SAHPT) to extract arbitrary vessels of different body parts. First, a geometry-intensity parametric model is constructed to calculate the geometry-intensity response. While geometry parameters are calculated to adapt to the variation in scale, intensity parameters can also be estimated to meet non-uniform intensity distributions. Then, a gradient parametric model is proposed to calculate the gradient response based on a multiscale symmetric normalized gradient filter which can effectively separate the target vessel from surrounding interfering tissue. Last, a hybrid parametric model that combines the geometry-intensity and gradient parametric models is constructed to evaluate how well it fits a local image patch. In the extraction process, a multipath spherical sampling strategy is used to solve the problem of anatomical complexity. We have conducted many quantitative experiments using the synthetic and clinical CTA data, asserting its superior performance compared to traditional or deep learning-based baselines.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61971118).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing in Medical Image, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China

    Qi Sun, Jinzhu Yang, Shuang Ma, Yan Huang & Yuliang Yuan

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China

    Qi Sun, Jinzhu Yang, Shuang Ma, Yan Huang & Yuliang Yuan

  3. Department of Radiology, ShengJing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, China

    Yang Hou

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Correspondence to Jinzhu Yang.

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Sun, Q., Yang, J., Ma, S. et al. 3D vessel extraction using a scale-adaptive hybrid parametric tracker. Med Biol Eng Comput 61, 2467–2480 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-023-02815-0

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