Vesselness Filters: A Survey with Benchmarks Applied to Liver Imaging

The accurate knowledge of vascular network geometry is crucial for many clinical applications such as cardiovascular disease diagnosis and surgery planning. Vessel enhancement algorithms are often a key step to improve the robustness of vessel segmentation. A wide variety of enhancement filters exists in the literature, but they are often difficult to compare as the applications and datasets differ from a paper to another and the code is rarely available. In this article, we compare seven vessel enhancement filters covering the last twenty years literature in a unique common framework. We focus our study on the liver vascular network which is under-represented in the literature. The evaluation is made from three points of view: the whole liver, the vessel neighborhood and the bifurcations. The study is performed on two publicly available datasets: the Ircad dataset (CT images) and the VascuSynth dataset adapted for MRI simulation. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each method in the hepatic context. In addition, the benchmark framework including a C++ implementation of each compared method is provided. An online demonstration ensures the reproducibility of the results without requiring any additional software.