Vessel segmentation in X-ray angiographic images using Hessian based vesselness filter and wavelet based image fusion

In this paper a method for segmentation of vessels in angiographic images is addressed. In this method for detecting the vessels in one angiographic frame, whole of angiographic frames in the sequence are utilized. For this purpose, firstly Hessian based vesselness filter is applied to the angiographic sequence to make discrimination between the vascular structures and the background. Afterward, the angiographic frames and their filtered versions are fused using 2D discrete wavelet transform to make an image to be used for vessel segmentation. In the next step, the fused image with a couple of constant values as coefficient is applied to the vesselness filtered frame as thresholds for detecting the heart vessels. The coefficients are used for adjusting the effect of threshold. As a result, two images containing the detected vessels are obtained. Since the yielded images have some false positives and false negatives, to obtain better segmentation accuracy, morphological operations are used to recover the removed vessels. Finally the result of the approach is prepared by combining the yielded images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting the heart vessels in X-ray angiographic images.