A fast seed detection using local geometrical feature for automatic tracking of coronary arteries in CTA

•The seed points are detected for automatic coronary artery tracking from CCTA.•The computational efficiency is improved using prior knowledge of vessel structure.•Using proposed method, a particle filtering-based tracking algorithm is tested.•ROC curve analysis shows the advantage of the proposed method.

We propose a fast seed detection for automatic tracking of coronary arteries in coronary computed tomographic angiography (CCTA). To detect vessel regions, Hessian-based filtering is combined with a new local geometric feature that is based on the similarity of the consecutive cross-sections perpendicular to the vessel direction. It is in turn founded on the prior knowledge that a vessel segment is shaped like a cylinder in axial slices. To improve computational efficiency, an axial slice, which contains part of three main coronary arteries, is selected and regions of interest (ROIs) are extracted in the slice. Only for the voxels belonging to the ROIs, the proposed geometric feature is calculated. With the seed points, which are the centroids of the detected vessel regions, and their vessel directions, vessel tracking method can be used for artery extraction. Here a particle filtering-based tracking algorithm is tested. Using 19 clinical CCTA datasets, it is demonstrated that the proposed method detects seed points and can be used for full automatic coronary artery extraction. ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve analysis shows the advantages of the proposed method.