Vasculature Detection In Angiograms Using Active Contours

Active contour models, or “snakes,” have shown themselves to be a powerful and flexible paradigm for many problems in image understanding. Active contour models are now applied to the problem of detecting coronary blood vessels in cardiac angiographic images, an important medical image understanding problem. Given two endpoints along a vessel, active contour models are used to find the vessel, resulting in greater consistency and less computation than traditional vessel detection algorithms. Snakes are also employed to detect vessels acrm multiple frames, a task which involves predicting the location of the snake in the current frame based on ita location in previous frames.