Detection of coronary artery tree using morphological operator

Presents a technique of the automatic detection of the coronary artery tree on the coronary cineangiogram. The method uses several kinds of morphological operations. The morphological Top-Hat operator is used for enhancing the shape of the artery. The morphological erosion and the half-thresholding are used for removing points except the coronary area. Then one can extract the entire coronary artery tree on the angiogram after pointing at just one point on the coronary artery. The extracted coronary parts are skeletonized by the thinning operation. Finally the morphological watershed transformation is done by using the skeleton and the dilated binary image of the coronary. As a result, a clear boundary of the coronary artery is obtainable automatically. Some experimental studies confirm the ease and correctness of the detection of the coronary artery boundary by the method proposed.