Knowledge-Based Blood Vessel Delineation On DSA Images

Blood vessel delineation on digital subtraction angiograms (DSA) is an essential step in the automatic localization and quantification of blood vessel abnormalities. In this paper, we first describe a general framework for object delineation on arbitrary images. We conclude that generic models and continuous delineation, which mostly implies returning to the image, are important characteristics of this framework. Subsequently, we discuss the knowledge-based system for blood vessel delineation that we are currently developing. The system starts from both a single angiogram and a stereoscopic or an orthogonal pair of angiograms. The use of a stereoscopic or orthogonal pair of images requires that a 3-D reconstruction be performed. We will see that this 3-D reconstruction is not considered as an independent process, separated from the delineation (or interpretation) process. Instead, we integrate both processes and exploit the knowledge obtained from the delineation to improve the reconstruction, and vice versa.