3D Multi-scale line filter for segmentation and visualization of curvilinear structures in medical images

This paper describes a method for the enhancement of curvilinear structures such as vessels and bronchi in 3D medical images. A 3D line enhancement lter is developed with the aim of discriminating line structures from other structures and recovering line structures of various widths. The 3D line lter is based on a combination of the eigenvalues of the 3D Hessian matrix. Multi-scale integration is formulated by taking the maximum among single-scale lter responses, and its characteristics are examined to derive criteria for the selection of parameters in the formulation. The resultant multi-scale lineltered images provide signi cantly improved segmentation and visualization of curvilinear structures. The usefulness of the method is demonstrated by the segmentation and visualization of brain vessels from MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and MRA (magnetic resonance angiography), bronchi from a chest CT, and liver vessels (portal veins) from