Comparison of three multi-scale vessel enhancement filters intended for intracranial MRA: Initial phantom results

Abstract

Vessel enhancement filtering has been proposed by a number of researchers as a preprocessing step to improve the vessel detail obtained in maximum intensity projection (MIP) images of 3D MRA data. In this paper we compare the performance of three proposed vessel enhancement filters as a function of contrast, signal-difference-to-noise ratio (SDNR) and vessel size. Filters were applied to simple digital phantoms where the signal, background and noise characteristics were known and could be precisely controlled. © 2001 SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering.