Automatic Fuzzy-based Hybrid Approach for Segmentation and Centerline Extraction of Main Coronary Arteries

Coronary arteries segmentation and centerlines extraction is an important step in Coronary Artery Disease diagnosis. The main purpose of the fully automated presented approaches is helping the clinical non-invasive diagnosis process to be done in fast way with accurate result. In this paper, a hybrid scheme is proposed to segment the coronary arteries and to extract the centerlines from Computed Tomography Angiography volumes. The proposed automatic hybrid segmentation approach combines the Hough transform with a fuzzy-based region growing algorithm. First, a circular Hough transform is used to detect initially the aorta circle. Then, the well-known Fuzzy c-mean algorithm is employed to detect the seed points for the region growing algorithm resulting in 3D binary volume. Finally, the centerlines of the segmented arteries are extracted based on the segmented 3D binary volume using a skeletonization based method. Using a benchmark database provided by the Rotterdam Coronary Artery Algorithm Evaluation Framework, the proposed algorithm is tested and evaluated. A comparative study shows that the proposed hybrid scheme is able to achieve a higher accuracy, in comparison to the most related and recent published work, at reasonable computational cost.