Gray-level hit-or-miss transform based region-growing for automatic segmentation of 3D coronary arteries

In this paper we propose a fully automatic algorithm for coronary artery extraction from X-ray data (3DCT scan, 64 detectors). Growing and thresholding methods, in their most general form, are not su cient to extract only the whole coronary arteries, because of the properties of these images [1]. Finding appropriate methods is known to be a challenging problem because of the data imperfections such as noise, heterogeneous intensity and contrasts of similar tissues. We deal with these challenges by employing discrete geometric tools to t on the arteries form independently from any perturbation of the data.