3D multi-scale vessel enhancement filtering based on curvature measurements: Application to time-of-flight MRA

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate the use of voxel intensity curvature measurements to enhance vessels in 3D MRA images. We compare a multi-scale discrete kernel filter (MaxCurve) to the Hessian matrix based filter proposed by Frangi and co-workers. The MaxCurve filter is based on the maximum difference between the negative curvature computed along orthogonal lines defined by a 3 × 3 × 3 kernel. Filter performance is assessed using measures of vessel and background separation (contrast and the area under the ROC curve). Filter parameters are optimized using a training set of four typical time-of-flight MRA images and tested on a separate set of ten MRA images with the same acquisition parameters. Th..