Extraction of vascular network in 3D images

Thin network extraction from three dimensional (3D) images is a new issue in image processing. It is of major importance in medical vascular imaging for diagnostics, therapy planning and surgery. Here, the authors develop a framework for automatic vascular network extraction from the volumic image. The approach consists in treating the 3D image as a hyper-surface of IR/sup 4/. It is shown that the crest points of this hyper-surface correspond to the center line of the thin network in the image. Promising results are shown on synthetic and real vascular images.