Blood vessel segmentation using multi-scale quadrature filtering

The segmentation of blood vessels is a common problem in medical imaging and various applications are found in diagnostics, surgical planning, training and more. Among many different techniques, the use of multiple scales and line detectors is a popular approach. However, the typical line filters used are sensitive to intensity variations and do not target the detection of vessel walls explicitly. In this article, we combine both line and edge detection using quadrature filters across multiple scales. The filter result gives well defined vessels as linear structures, while distinct edges facilitate a robust segmentation. We apply the filter output to energy optimization techniques for segmentation and show promising results in 2D and 3D to illustrate the behavior of our method. The conference version of this article received the best paper award in the bioinformatics and biomedical applications track at ICPR 2008.