Blood vessels , multi - scale filtering and level set methods

Image segmentation is the problem of partitioning an image into meaningful parts, often consisting of an object and background. As an important part of many imaging applications, e.g. face recognition, tracking of moving cars and people etc, it is of general interest to design robust and fast segmentation algorithms. However, it is well accepted that there is no general method for solving all segmentation problems. Instead, the algorithms have to be highly adapted to the application in order to achieve good performance. In this thesis, we will study segmentation methods for blood vessels in medical images. The need for accurate segmentation tools in medical applications is driven by the increased capacity of the imaging devices. Common modalities such as CT and MRI generate images which simply cannot be examined manually, due to high resolutions and a large number of image slices. Furthermore, it is very difficult to visualize complex structures in three-dimensional image volumes without cutting away large portions of, perhaps important, data. Tools, such as segmentation, can aid the medical staff in browsing through such large images by highlighting objects of particular importance. In addition, segmentation in particular can output models of organs, tumors, and other structures for further analysis, quantification or simulation. We have divided the segmentation of blood vessels into two parts. First, we model the vessels as a collection of lines and edges (linear structures) and use filtering techniques to detect such structures in an image. Second, the output from this filtering is used as input for segmentation tools. Our contributions mainly lie in the design of a multi-scale filtering and integration scheme for detecting vessels of varying widths and the modification of optimization schemes for finding better segmentations than traditional methods do. We validate our ideas on synthetical images mimicking typical blood vessel structures, and show proof-of-concept results on real medical images.